Literary World

Growing up in America but never feeling entirely part of it defined a large portion of my childhood.

I’m a second-generation immigrant from North Africa. Growing up in New Jersey, most of the people of color I met were Indian or Chinese. We didn’t all have the same relationship with war. Different cultures have inherited different military traditions, different histories, different ideas about honor, resistance, strategy, and survival.

But there is something particularly strange about the way the Western world has come to understand war.

The West has produced some of the most devastating wars in human history. World War I was among the bloodiest conflicts the world had ever seen. Technology had advanced dramatically, while the international rules and institutions governing its use had not kept pace. Machine guns, chemical weapons, artillery, and industrialized warfare transformed killing into something that could happen on a scale previous generations could scarcely imagine.

And the people caught inside it suffered accordingly.

Soldiers and civilians endured conditions that, outside the context of war, we would describe as torture.

Yet I grew up learning about war primarily from the perspective of the people who survived it, and, often, the people who won it.

America has its own mythology surrounding war. We learn our history through our battles, our heroes, our victories, our enemies. Even when we acknowledge the atrocities committed by our own side, they can become footnotes in a much larger story about patriotism, sacrifice, and triumph. Young Washington was a lovely new movie I watched about George Washington’s growth. But it overswept all death and atrocity in the face of Washington’s patriotism and heroism.

And then there’s the way we teach children about death.

When I was younger, one of the funniest jokes I made, in my opinion, was while driving past a graveyard with my mother.

“Look! It’s all my favorite book characters!”

Which was, admittedly, true.

It was also deeply disrespectful.

And, in retrospect, disturbing for another reason.

Western children’s literature has become remarkably comfortable with death. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Books like They Both Die at the End and Harry Potter can teach children how to process mortality before they encounter it in their own lives. Keeper of the Lost Cities helped me cope with the death of my uncle, Bashir.

Stories can make death comprehensible.

But stories can also make death beautiful.

They can make it grand and dramatic and meaningful in ways that real death rarely is. Characters die nobly. They deliver their final speeches. Music swells. Their deaths change the world.

Real death is usually uglier. There is no soundtrack. No satisfying final line that makes it all mean something.

Sometimes there isn’t even a lesson.

My TikTok and Instagram feeds are flooded with Gen Z jokes about dying. “I wish I were dead” becomes a punchline. And, I’ll admit, I find some of them hilarious.

But humor has consequences when it becomes our default language for mortality.

It can make death feel distant and abstract.

Something normal.

And maybe that helps explain why we can scroll past images of suffering without stopping.

Right now, Palestinian children are dying, and families are facing devastating deprivation of food, water, shelter, and medical care amid an ongoing war. International humanitarian law exists precisely because war does not erase the value of human life.

And yet people scroll past. Not because they don’t care, or they’re bad people.

Sometimes because caring is exhausting. Sometimes because taking a position means being attacked by the other side. And sometimes because suffering has become just another thing on the feed.

Death has become so common in our entertainment, our humor, our news, and our political language that emotional appeals, our pathos, can begin to lose their power.

We claim to be one of the most technologically and socially advanced civilizations in history.

But we can watch innocent people die and argue about which side deserves our sympathy like human suffering is a gladiatorial match. Like any civilian on either side deserves this.

Like children deserve this.

Even Gladiator made millions.

I was raised to treat death reverently. When we die, we go to Jannah, heaven, or Jahannam, hell. Religion makes death sacred. It gives mortality weight.

But even outside religion, I think we need something that performs the same function.

We need to remember that a dead person was a person. Not a casualty. Not a statistic.

Not collateral damage.

A person.

And this is where I think our understanding of war has failed us. We became very good at talking about death without talking about the dead. We discuss casualty numbers. We debate military strategy. We analyze body counts.

But every number contains a person who had a life before they became a number.

There was a child who annoyed them. A mother who worried about them. A friend who knew their favorite song. A person who wanted something from life.

This is why I don’t believe there are always good people and bad people in war.

There are rarely two perfectly clean sides.

Those are concepts from fairy tales, from the stories Disney gave us to help us understand a complicated world.

There is your side.

There is theirs.

And sometimes your side does something terrible.

But sometimes theirs does something so terrible that it seems to fall out of the gray and into the black.

And sometimes both sides do terrible things.

That doesn’t mean morality disappears.

It means morality becomes harder.

War does not give us permission to stop caring about human beings simply because they belong to the other side.

I care about what happens in Palestine.

But sometimes it feels like caring itself has become political. If you sympathize with one group, you’re accused of hating another. If you condemn one government’s actions, you’re accused of supporting its enemies.

So the easiest option became not caring at all.

But you should care. Not because you have to choose a political team.

Because death matters.

Because life matters.

As long as our lives mean something, death means something. One life can contain goals. Dreams. A book you haven’t written yet, a corporate ladder you haven’t climbed, a house you haven’t built. Maybe a show you haven’t directed, a painting you haven’t finished, or even a trail you haven’t biked.

A person you haven’t fallen in love with. A country you haven’t seen. A neighborhood you haven’t made better.

Every person who dies loses all of those possibilities.

That is what death is.

A universe of possibilities, suddenly gone.

I care about every life, so I care about every death.

Do you?