I want you to pause, just for a moment, and reconsider the people someone is telling you to fear.
Humanize them.
Not as a rhetorical gesture, not as a political act, but as a moral one. The kind of moral clarity that comes from looking someone in the eyes and recognizing a mirror instead of a threat.
Because your people—like mine—are not some faceless swarm, not the caricatures you’re fed by news tickers and men in suits with flags on their lapels. My people are complicated, aching, striving. They are stubborn and brilliant and full of contradiction. They are soft-spoken grandmothers who once marched in the streets, and young men with too much anger and not enough hope. They are mothers who pray under their breath while making tea, fathers who take the night shift so their children don’t have to. They are teenagers in knock-off sneakers dreaming of something better, even when everything around them tells them not to.
And yes, we have our liars, our cheats, our killers. So do you. We have people who’ve hurt others and people who’ve been broken by those harms. We have people who are trying, earnestly, to do better. Some make it. Some don’t. That is the nature of being human—not good or bad, but messy and trying and full of contradictions. Your people, like mine, are mostly just doing what they can to make it through the day. To love their families. To fix what they’ve broken. To find moments of peace. To carry on in a world that rarely gives them the benefit of the doubt.
We are not so different. But we’ve been taught to believe we are. Taught to look at each other and see threat instead of kin. It serves someone, this story of “us” and “them.” It always does.
But the truth is, no one deserves to live under a sky filled with drones. No one deserves to have a boot pressed to their neck literal or metaphorical by regimes that traffic in fear and control. No one deserves to have their lives reduced to geopolitical chess moves or propaganda campaigns. These people you’re being told are “the other”? They deserve dignity. They deserve safety. They deserve the space to live and stumble and rise again.
And if you can see that if you can admit that your people and my people are, in the most essential ways, the same then maybe you’ll also see that the real enemy has always been something else entirely.
It’s not the families trying to survive. It’s the governments who would rather watch us tear each other apart than reckon with their own sins.
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