Words carry a weight they never did before. "Liberty and justice for all" feels like a hollow promise, a commitment with boundaries. Peace has been reduced to a mere afterthought, something spoken of in passing but never truly pursued. As I survey the world around me, it is clear that our passion and responsibility for promoting equality—especially under the law—have been hijacked by the relentless pursuit of profit. This pursuit is tainted by hate, bigotry, and the ceaseless cycle of war.

Our most precious assets, our children, are being overlooked, their value recognized only when it’s time to dig the mass graves for those lost. The world watched as they were bombed into oblivion, as though their lives were disposable because they were not our children, not yours or mine. But their survival deserved our concern, our unwavering commitment. Instead, their deaths have become a grim routine—too normal, too accepted. Bosnia, Syria, Yemen, and now Palestine—the same horror, different names.

Politics and diplomacy no longer strive to foster ethical behavior; instead, they exist to maintain the status quo. They mold populations to become instruments of mass persuasion, to prepare citizens for moral compromise. They teach us to make peace with the ethical failings of our leaders, to accept the inhumanity of our nation’s actions on the global stage. They condition us to turn a blind eye to the misery that surrounds us, to embrace a life of excess while numbing ourselves to the suffering of others. We now nod in smug satisfaction, basking in our own good fortune, as we sip our overpriced lattes at Starbucks, comfortably ensconced in our moral isolation, our philosophical quarantine. Right there on our television screens are the starving millions, whose plight we have chosen to dismiss with a benign indifference. For some, for those like him, perhaps the years of self-deception and the slow erosion of empathy have done their work all too well. It’s no longer in our nature to interrupt our meal, to put down our forks, or to wipe the smug satisfaction off our faces,

The "first" world has ceased to care about the "third" world, and this has been our reality for years. We sit surrounded by maître d's, headwaiters, and busboys, whose primary task is to shield us from the unsightly truth—the emaciated bodies, the glaring desperation. If, by some chance, our gaze lingers too long, they are there to reassure us that the life within those starved, rib-caged bodies is not worth weeping over. They exist to protect us from the discomfort of empathy, to ensure that we remain cocooned in our privilege, unburdened by the suffering that exists just beyond our comfortable reach.

We are living in a desperate fraud if we believe that we can overturn the deep injustices in this land without facing the price of powerful confrontation and disruption. This is not merely an academic argument; it is a deeply ingrained North American delusion. The liberal myth tells us that wars can end, the poor can sleep peacefully, schools can thrive, and the children of the impoverished can learn, aspire, and succeed—all while we, who have long reaped the benefits of their hunger, segregation, and fear, remain untouched, unscathed, and comfortable. But this is a lie.

We cannot continue to enjoy our leisurely outings, our evenings at the amphitheater, our season tickets, and brunches if we truly desire to change the course of our society and save the lives of dying children. The comforts we cling to have been bought with the suffering of others, and to believe that we can maintain these luxuries while addressing deep-seated inequalities is a dangerous and willful illusion. Real change demands sacrifice; it requires us to confront the very structures that have allowed us to live in comfort while others suffer. Only by acknowledging this truth can we hope to redirect our priorities and create a world where every child has the chance to thrive.

It only changes with us and the messages we send out to advance justice and peace, but we must begin with ourselves. Then we draw a line in the sand and tell those who we have entrusted with the duties of promoting what is right to stop what they have done in the past and what are doing right now