by Olivia Sullivent

We live in a world that is constantly on fire, yet we are expected to discuss it as if it were a dinner-party topic.

Gaza is called a conflict, as if that word neutralizes the bodies beneath it. As if flattening neighborhoods, starving families, and killing children can be softened by vocabulary. 

Racism becomes a conversation. Gun control becomes a complex issue. Global warming is framed as a future concern, even as entire communities are already disappearing. Language becomes a cushion, something plush enough that people who are untouched can sit comfortably while the world collapses elsewhere.

Yet we are instructed, time and time again, to be calm.

Be nuanced. Be peaceful. Don’t be radical. Don’t make people uncomfortable. If you want to be taken seriously, you must speak about mass death as though you are mildly inconvenienced by it.

What’s happening in Gaza is not abstract. It is not something that can be “discussed from both sides” without erasing the scale of the violence. And still, the dominant concern in many conversations is how people are reacting to it.

Call it genocide, and you’re “extreme.”

Name power and you’re “divisive.”

Demand accountability and you’re “oversimplifying.”

The violence itself fades into the background, replaced by a debate about whether your words were too sharp for polite consumption.

But politeness has always been political.

It decides whose pain is allowed to be loud and whose must be quiet. It protects those in power by setting the rules of how injustice is discussed. It teaches us that anger is a failure of our character rather than a rational response to death. That the real threat is not guns, bombs, or starvation, but people who refuse to speak about them nicely.

I keep thinking about how strange it is that we ask for decorum in the face of obliteration. How absurd it is that our society demands composure while we watch innocent people die. How deeply broken a moral framework must be to find rage more disturbing than what causes it.

That same demand for tranquility is playing out now as ICE raids homes, jobs, and streets. As agents detain, brutalize, and deport people, sometimes killing them, the loudest concern is still about tone. About whether the outrage is too much, too angry, too disruptive.

There is something violent about asking people to translate their horror into something palatable. Politeness does not stop injustice; it just makes it easier to live with.

Maybe that’s the point.

If we can keep the language clean, we can keep our hands clean. If we can frame Gaza as complicated, we never have to call it unbearable. If we can call ICE raids “enforcement,” we can ignore the terror. If we can insist on neutrality, we never have to choose a side that costs us anything.

I don’t believe in a reasonableness that asks people to swallow their grief to keep others comfortable, and I don’t think injustice deserves politeness when it shows none in return.

The world is not ending quietly, so why are we expected to respond as if it is?

Honestly,

Liv