As a father, I know something in my bones, a child is not truly yours.

They are borrowed breath, loaned light, manifested dreams.

Every ancient people who ever walked this earth knew this. The Lakota say “mitákuye oyásʼiŋ” — we are all related. The Greeks gave us Niobe, who wept so long for her slaughtered children that the gods turned her into a fountain of endless tears, because grief that immense has nowhere else to go.

And yet there are men, and they are almost always men, sitting in climate-controlled rooms, moving pieces on maps, who have decided that someone else's child is an acceptable loss. “Collateral damage.” That phrase should make every decent human being want to vomit.

It is the language of cowardice. It is what you say when you need to sleep at night after signing something that will make mothers dig through rubble with their bare hands, screaming a name that will never answer back.

These men, wealthy and untouchable, whose own children are safe in guarded schools in countries that never get bombed, are not making hard decisions. They are making “easy” ones. Because the distance between a “situation room” and a bombed school is, for them, infinite.

Every wisdom tradition on this earth, without exception, understood one bedrock covenant: “you do not harm children.” This is not politics. When you violate it, you don't just commit a crime, you commit a spiritual annihilation.

And a society that watches, shrugs, and scrolls past the images? That society has not lost its moral authority. It has burned it down and danced in the ashes.

The ancients believed that the blood of the innocent cries out from the ground. Not metaphorically. Literally. That there is a reckoning, not always immediate, not always visible, but as certain as seasons.

Every one of us who stays silent becomes part of what we claim to condemn.