Field Notes from the Wreckage
Day 3,247 of the Forever War. Location: Somewhere in the rubble between the barricades.
They're fighting over the body. His corpse hasn't even cooled and it's already been drafted into service by both armies. One side wants to turn him into a martyred saint as proof their enemies are literal demons. The other side is hosting grief circles and issuing carefully worded statements about the structural violence inherent in dehumanizing rhetoric. Neither seems particularly interested in the actual human being who died, or the actual human being who killed him, or the actual humans trying to figure out how to send their kids to school tomorrow in a country where political assassinations are becoming part of the evening news rotation.
I used to have opinions about these things. I used to craft thoughtful responses, cite relevant studies, engage in good faith dialogue. Now I mostly just watch the machine churn bodies into content. A dead guy becomes a martyr becomes a fundraising email becomes a workshop on channeling rage becomes a social media trend becomes ammunition for the next round of the Forever War. The cycle completes in about 72 hours these days. We're getting more efficient at it.
The worst part isn't the violence—though that's plenty bad enough. The worst part is how predictable it all is. You could have written the responses before anyone got shot. Hell, you probably did write them, in some parallel universe where political violence became so routine we started keeping mad libs on standby. "Today we mourn the tragic loss of [INSERT NAME], whose [INSERT POLITICAL AFFILIATION] politics we [AGREED/DISAGREED] with, but whose death reminds us that [INSERT MORAL LESSON] in these [TROUBLED/UNPRECEDENTED/DIVIDED] times."
There are folks who think the Left are cowards for not just saying "murder is bad" without a preamble about politics. I think they're missing the point. The Left can't just say "murder is bad" because they've built an entire identity around being more morally sophisticated than everyone else. Admitting that basic human decency doesn't require a PhD in intersectional theory would undermine the whole project. Meanwhile, some people just can't say "this is sad" without calling people demons and wussies, because the Right's identity depends on being more authentically angry than everyone else.
Both sides are trapped in their own performance. The Left have to prove they're still pure after expressing human sympathy for an ideological enemy. The Right have to prove they're still tough after acknowledging that maybe assassinating people is concerning. Neither can just be human beings responding to a human tragedy because being human doesn't fit the brand.
I keep thinking about a recent email that had something genuinely thoughtful about grief and violence and the need for moral clarity. It was probably the most balanced response I saw all day. And my first thought reading it was: "This will accomplish absolutely nothing." Not because it wasn't true or important, but because truth and importance aren't the currencies that matter anymore. What matters is tribal loyalty, enemy identification, and content generation.
The machine doesn't want nuance. It wants fuel. Violent death is fuel. A nuanced message is fuel. A vitriolic rant is fuel. This field note is fuel. Everything gets fed into the furnace that powers the Forever War, and we all pretend we're making meaningful distinctions about the quality of the fuel.
I don't know who was the perpetrator nor their reasons. Neither do you. Neither does anyone posting hot takes about it. But that doesn't matter because the story was written before the trigger got pulled. We just needed someone to fill in the blanks. Both the shooter and target volunteered, probably for reasons well above my pay grade. The rest of us are conscripts in an army we never enlisted in, fighting a war nobody can win.
Meanwhile, entropy is leisurely sitting back and letting us consume ourselves. Climate change doesn't need to end democracy—we're doing it for free. Economic inequality doesn't need to shatter communities—we're handling that ourselves. Why bother with external threats when the humans are so committed to their own destruction?
The guy in the foxhole said he just doesn't care anymore, and I'm there with him. I used to care. I used care about the kids traumatized by witnessing a murder. I used to care about families dealing with grief in a media circus. I used to care about the next person who decides political violence is the solution to whatever's eating them alive. I used to care about the democracy slowly bleeding out while we argue about who gets to hold the bandages.
Caring is exhausting when the machine keeps demanding fresh outrage every 72 hours. Maybe that's the real strategy—exhaust everyone capable of actual human response until only the true believers are left standing. I'm watching Orks and Eldar fighting over the rubble, and even the "Waaagh!" is drowned in the noise.
The war will win. We'll all lose. And it's hard to care anymore, for a myriad of reasons.
But here we are, still taking notes from the wreckage, still hoping someone might read them someday and remember that once upon a time, some of us tried to stay human while the world burned itself down around us.
End transmission.