We Live in War

2025.07.05.

I feel that this period of my life is about how I relate to my community. Today I had a conversation where I sat quietly, listening to the words my partner spoke. Quietly and with sadness.

Even the small community I live in is deeply polarized. We are full of fears and questions, while dozens of podcasts spew information at us about who is good, who is bad, who will save us, and who will betray us.

I am tired. Not just now — I have been for a long time. But I don’t believe silence is the answer to this exhaustion. The answer to the screaming crowd cannot be solitary silence.

Let’s talk. About this too. And let’s do something within our own small community to make it better where we live. Because that is where we can act. And if life becomes better for us, perhaps it will serve as an example for others, and they will try too. And if they succeed, then more and more small communities will follow — and eventually, our country can truly become what it is meant to be.

Our home. A place where it feels good to live, where it feels good to be. Together.

But today we live in war.

And this war did not erupt in Ukraine, or somewhere far away in the East. It broke out here. No one else was needed — just us, and the fact that our safety has become more important to us today than our freedom. We are afraid. Afraid of making hard decisions, fleeing from their burdens, and gladly handing over to others the opportunity, the right, to tell us what to do and what to think.

We march behind our leaders, our thought-leaders, whose voices have spread like indestructible fungi into every nerve ending of our bodies, controlling our every move like unconscious living dead. Zombies are fighting battles, the events of this war unfolding every day. And we no longer sense it, no longer see it, or no longer believe our eyes, because our bodies haven’t died — our world has not become undead in a physical sense.

It is our thoughts, our will, our self-determination that are dying faster and faster.

Political ideologies, economic interests, imagined and real events, and the fears they generate are destroying our communities, our circles of friends. And once our capacity for independent thought is gone, we become rotting corpses hunting those who still dare to think for themselves — friends, brothers, anyone in whom we sense the pulse of difference.

And when the horde catches such an unfortunate soul, we tear them apart in the town square with teeth rotten and festering from hatred, while the starving crowd scrambles for the scraps left on the bone — for the intoxicating remnants of freedom. Intoxicating, because it is missing, and we crave it so deeply, though we no longer understand that freedom is not something to be devoured.

Today, a person capable of thought is prey.

Because they are free. Because they ask questions. Because they don’t believe everything immediately, no matter who says it. Because they don’t hate instantly, no matter what the other believes. Because they remain silent when everyone else is shouting. That is why the horde hunts them. The horde that no longer even knows how it became zombies, that no longer remembers that once it was something else — maybe once it too was prey. Today the horde only swallows, devours, snarls, roars — and it doesn’t matter what message, what logo, what face is on its banner. It marches in frenzy, hungry for the last scraps of thought. For the last bones of freedom.

The absence of thought devours everything.

And what should someone do who doesn’t fit in, who doesn’t want to join this howling, snarling collective death dance? Perhaps they must believe that even if they are fewer, they are still normal, that they don’t have to belong to the horde. Even if it comes at a cost.

Loneliness. Exclusion. Isolation…

But life always finds a way. One way or another. Don’t be lonely, don’t be excluded. Speak your mind, stand up for yourself, and listen to others.

And think!