For Such a Time as This, We Became Cowards
I want with most of my heart to believe Trump’s “ceasefire” is real. I really do. But some of you may not know this: I voted for that crazy bastard. Not because I worshiped him. Not because I thought he was some polished statesman sent down from the mountain with tablets and wisdom. I voted for him because I thought he would stop the wars. I thought, however crude, however vulgar, however full of himself, that maybe he would be the man too arrogant to keep feeding the machine. I was wrong. Dead wrong. And there is a particular kind of disgust that comes with realizing you did not just misread a politician. You misread the appetite of an empire. Because that is what this is. Not leadership. Not peace through strength. Not national interest wrapped in a flag and sold back to the people like redemption. It is the same blood-soaked racket with a different salesman.
And before Trump, and especially after October 7, something else started waking up in me. October 7 was horrific. Full stop. But what the state of Israel has unleashed on Gaza in response has been a historic moral catastrophe, a campaign of destruction so vast, so merciless, so stripped of human proportion that the justifications for it now sound like the babbling of men who think power itself is innocence. The suffering once inflicted on a people who knew the machinery of persecution firsthand now appears, seventy-five years later, made manifest against Palestinians beneath the language of security, necessity, and civilized restraint. That should rot the conscience of the world. Instead, too many still clap on cue, nod along, and call the obliteration of a trapped population “complicated” because they do not have the courage to say what their own eyes can already see.
And still, with all my heart, I want to believe that somewhere inside all this bullshit, all this pain, all this official condescension, all this managerial cruelty dressed up as policy, “We the People” can still matter. I want to believe that ordinary people are not just livestock with smartphones, marched from paycheck to paycheck while the people above us gamble with fire and call it governance. Because if life is nothing more than something to be snuffed out by those who rule over us, then why the fuck are we here? Why endure? Why love anybody? Why make art? Why tell the truth? Why claw our way back from despair if the final word belongs only to cowards in suits and zealots with launch codes?
We are here now. Here in this hour. To borrow the old biblical language, for such a time as this. But not in the way I thought when I was young. Not in the adolescent fantasy where I would grow up to save the world as some polished little prophet, some next Billy Graham with the right lines and the right fire and the right crowd saying amen on command. Life burned that illusion out of me. Through fuckups, war, study, heartbreak, and nights so dark I nearly did not survive them, I came out with something more useful than certainty. I came out with a heart that wants humanity to live. Not dominate. Not conquer. Not cleanse itself in some apocalyptic orgasm of ideology and vengeance. Live. I want children to inherit a future, not a crater. I want people to know love without having to first survive horror. I want us to quit worshiping death every time it puts on the mask of order.
Instead, here we are, still fighting over the same diseased fantasy the ancients fought over. My god is better than yours. My tribe knows heaven better than your tribe. My understanding of the universe is so elevated, so righteous, so self-evidently superior that I am justified in humiliating you, ruling you, bombing you, starving you, erasing you, all to make my story the only story left standing. It is lunacy. Ancient lunacy with newer weapons and slicker press secretaries. It is a mockery of life and of whatever sacredness life ever had. It is not supposed to be about the argument itself. It is supposed to be about why you believe the argument in the first place. But nobody knows their own arguments anymore. Nobody goes deep enough to find the roots. They inherit slogans, tribal reflexes, algorithmic talking points, and then call that conviction.
So now we argue on the surface of a deep fjord under a paper-thin layer of ice. We slash at each other, posture at each other, sneer at each other, and call it discourse. But every blow thins the ice. Every lie warms the water. Every dead child, every cynical speech, every sanctimonious fraud pretending mass suffering is unfortunate but necessary, every coward who knows better and says nothing, every preacher who blesses empire, every politician who feeds death and calls it peace, every one of them weakens what is holding us up. The ice melts more and more. And if we do not change, not cosmetically, not rhetorically, but fundamentally, then our legacy will not be something our children cherish. It will not be carved into memorial stone with gratitude. It will be remembered, if at all, as the age when human beings had every warning, every lesson, every corpse, every scripture, every philosophy, every historical scar laid before them and still chose madness.
I was wrong. I wanted to believe power might restrain itself. I wanted to believe the machine could be steered by a man vulgar enough to hate the language of war. But the machine does not care who sits in the chair. It feeds on us all the same.
And that is exactly why the people still matter. Because the only thing more dangerous than the men at the top is the silence below them. The shrug. The surrender. The lie that nothing can be done. Something can always be done. Truth can still be said. Refusal can still be made. Courage can still be contagious. Humanity can still be chosen. And if we are here for such a time as this, then maybe that calling is far less glamorous than I once imagined. Maybe it is not about being a savior. Maybe it is about refusing to become a servant of death. Maybe it is about standing in the wreckage and saying no, this is not what life is for. Not this. Not this endless altar of blood. Not this empire of excuses. Not this.
