News Alerts

There are times when I really don’t like having news notifications on my phone.

I was playing video games last night, a Friday night relaxing after the work week, when my phone buzzed. I glanced over and promptly learnt that Israel and the United States had launched missile attacks on Iran.

Perhaps I was naive to hope that this wouldn’t happen. To hope that the amassing of warships was just saber-rattling. That the rhetoric was just bloviating by a wannabe-dictator still smug from deposing a fellow head of state in January. That those checks-and-balances extolled in high school government classes had weight and weren’t just the propaganda of American exceptionalism.

And now, here we are.

Missiles have bombarded a city the population of New York City during the start of their workweek. A girls’ school was hit, killing over a hundred children. The American president has called for regime change in Iran, encouraging the protest movement to seize power even as his policies deport Iranians living in the United States while his extralegal police army summarily executes American citizens in the streets. 

I wish it could make sense. I wish that American governance was not headed up by a capricious narcissist who turns whims into fiat as he’s backed by sycophants who see his megalomania as a route to power, be it cloaked in naked capitalism or twisted religion. I wish I didn’t have a wave of latent anxiety every time my phone buzzes with a news alert.

Not all of it affects me: I’m safe and sound with a stable job and housing and no fear of missiles raining overhead. But it so easily could; and what makes the people living in fear of death and destruction so different from me? Some time ago, on NPR’s Up First, there was an interview with a man around my age living in Beirut as it was being bombed. He stayed there since he didn’t want to leave his cats and, smoking a cigarette amongst the rubble, told the reporter that he spends his free time playing video games. NPR’s journalist, Eyder Peralta, goes on to say the man “jokes that these days, the booms of the airstrikes around him give his games a more realistic feel.” That wry humor struck me as being so, so familiar. I doubt that, were I in his situation, would I react so differently, quipping about the irony of playing war simulation games as one breaks out around you. And I can’t help but to wonder if I’ve encountered him in one of the games I’ve played online.

It’s so easy to dismiss people elsewhere, be it Tehran, Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela, Beirut, or Minneapolis, as being ‘those people.’ It’s them, not us. Just numbers and collateral damage abroad in pursuit of our own protection at home. Dozens dead is a statistic. But people are people wherever they are. Different, full of their own idiosyncrasies, and people all the same with their lives. People like you. People like me. My Friday night of video games was interrupted by news of missile attacks — missile attacks that no doubt interrupted someone’s Saturday morning of video games. And the despair I feel when I hear of these attacks is mixed with a rage that lives can be written off just because they live so far away.

While writing this post this morning, news broke that the Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameni, was killed. I wonder if the powers that be will say that it justifies the attack, that callous calculus dictates a willingness to trade the lives of a hundred schoolchildren (and who knows how many more) for the death of one man. I wonder how many more people need to die, how many lives need to be disrupted, how much suffering will happen just to satisfy the whims of the powerful. This isn’t the world I want. This isn’t the world I hoped for when I was young. But even if I don’t know what to do, I know that a better world is possible, and I know it’s something to fight for.