It’s the cruelty I can’t let go of. It keeps spinning around in my head - an intangible and unfathomable thing I can’t quite grasp, even while the evidence stares at me from the screen. How can this be a real thing, in this world we’ve deluded ourselves into hoping was somehow evolved beyond this inhumanity?

It’s the well-coifed woman dressed in athleisure and a ball cap, casually posing for a photo op in front of a cell full of shaved and shirtless men - men we’re supposed to see as sub-human. It’s the men in black on the street, scooping up a scared young PhD student and sending her off to a facility in another state. And it’s the people in the Ukraine and Gaza, treated like little more than collateral damage while the Big Boys play their demented war games.

I grieve for this profound loss of our humanity. I grieve for this unfathomable cruelty. I grieve for the trauma buried in the soil of our culture, this cancer that passes from one body to the next.