Human Collateral Damage is Dehumanization 

I am an American, a Brit, an Israeli, and a Jew (listed alphabetically). I am also a Democrat, retiree, math game player, father, gardener, cyclist, friend, and more.

We are Palestinian, we are Israeli, we are American, we are Russian. At this national level, the terms “father”, “gardener”, etc. must be dropped. None of these individual attributes spans the gamut of the whole nation i.e., most of the nation are not gardeners. We are not all young or old, male or female.

We are human. We must now drop all national characteristics. We are not all Chinese, Indian, French, etc. We are human. Period. Full stop.

Were a hostile alien species from the planet Tralfamadore (thanks for the name, Kurt Vonnegut), to invade Earth, there would be no Russians, no Ukrainians, just humans fighting the invasive aliens. This was the theme of the movie “Independence Day”.

We are human. So, how does one lose one’s humanity? It was when that person decided that hundreds or thousands of beautiful 4-year-olds could be murdered by his tribe directly or indirectly (and it makes no difference which). See my TOI posts on Tribalism TOI Tribalism 1  and TOI Tribalism 2 

Shlomo and Fatima, Gamal and Aliza, Leila and Moshe, Mohammed and Rachel, Khadijeh and Avi, Abdel and Shoshana, and more names than I can ever list. Dead.  Killed. Murdered. Perhaps in the land beyond the sky, in the place known as the “Human Heaven,” these Muslim-Jewish pairs can be married. I am informed that, unlike the State of Israel, there is civil marriage in Human Heaven.

Don’t just say you are sorry about these murdered kids. Or that they are “Collateral Damage”. Collateral damage is a term used by the immoral, language-corrupting Pentagon.

The kids are dead. Hundreds and thousands of dead kids are not collateral damage.  We dehumanize the dead kids and ourselves by saying thousands of dead kids are collateral damage.