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What the Forgotten Crises Teach Us

There is a list that the United Nations maintains, updated annually, of humanitarian crises that are classified as “underfunded.” In practice, this means crises that have been forgotten – not resolved, but removed from the public consciousness through the simple mechanism of other, newer emergencies competing for the same finite pool of attention and resources.

The people in these crises are still displaced. Still hungry. Still dying at rates that would command headlines if they occurred in countries the media considers important. The difference is that no one is writing about them anymore.

The Border Is a Network Problem

I crossed the border between China and Korea fourteen times. Each crossing required a different route, a different assessment of patrol patterns, a different calculation of risk. The border was not a line. It was a problem, and the problem had solutions, but each solution was temporary, and the cost of getting it wrong was death.

I describe this not because the details of 19th-century border crossing are directly applicable to the present. I describe it because the structure of the problem has not changed. What has changed is the terrain.

The Oath and the Office

I would like to begin with a document that every officeholder in a democracy has signed and very few have read carefully: the oath of office.

The oath – in its various national formulations – commits the officeholder to serve the public interest, uphold the law, and discharge their duties with integrity. It does not mention party loyalty. It does not mention donor obligations. It does not mention reelection strategy. It does not mention the expedient thing, the popular thing, or the thing most likely to generate a favorable news cycle.

The Steel-Man Obligation

There is a practice in modern public discourse that I find not merely unpersuasive but intellectually dishonest, and it is so widespread that most people no longer recognize it as a failure. It is the habit of engaging with the weakest version of an opposing argument rather than the strongest.

The name for this failure is the straw man. The remedy is what philosophers call the steel man: the deliberate construction of the most powerful, most coherent version of a position you disagree with, so that when you refute it, you have actually refuted something worth refuting.

I Went to the Settlement

They told me the relocation was voluntary. They told me the families were given notice. They told me the process was conducted with dignity and in accordance with the law.

I went to the settlement.

I want to be precise about what I saw, because precision is the enemy of the official narrative, and the official narrative is what I am here to dismantle.

What I Found

The settlement is on the eastern edge of the city, where the paved roads end and the unpaved roads begin. Forty-three families were living there two weeks ago. Today, the structures are gone. What remains are concrete foundations, scattered belongings, and the marks in the earth where walls used to be.

The Gala Industrial Complex

The invitation arrived on heavy cardstock, embossed in gold. The theme of this year’s charity gala is “Fighting Hunger Together.” Black tie. Valet parking. Open bar. The ticket price is five hundred dollars per person, which is, by a meaningful coincidence, approximately what a family of four in the neighborhoods this charity claims to serve spends on food in two months.

I love a good party. But I have questions.

The Anatomy of a Lost Cause

I would like to examine what it means for a cause to be “lost,” because the phrase is used so frequently in geopolitical discourse that its actual content has become invisible. When an analyst, a diplomat, or a journalist describes a situation as a lost cause, they are making a specific claim – and it is usually the wrong one.

The claim is that the situation cannot be resolved. That the forces in play are too entrenched, the actors too intractable, the history too bitter for any outcome other than continued suffering.

The Note Beneath the Note

There is a way of listening that most people never learn. It is not a technique, exactly – not a skill you acquire through practice in the way you learn to play an instrument or read a score. It is more like an orientation. A willingness to hear not just the sounds that arrive at your ear, but the silence between them, the intention behind them, the weight of what the musician chose not to play.

The Arrow Is Not the Story

Everyone wants to talk about the arrows.

They paint me riddled with them. They build statues of the moment I was shot. They remember the image: the body, the wounds, the spectacle of suffering.

No one paints the morning after. No one builds a statue of a man pulling barbs from his own flesh, cleaning the wounds with what he had, and deciding – before the sun was fully up – that he was not done.

Empathy Is Not a Feeling

The word “empathy” has been so thoroughly degraded by popular usage that I must begin by reclaiming it from the territory of sentiment and returning it to the territory of philosophy, where it originated and where it does its most important work.

Empathy, in common usage, means “feeling what another person feels.” This definition is not merely imprecise. It is wrong in a way that obscures the most valuable thing about empathy and replaces it with something that is, at best, sympathetic projection and, at worst, a form of emotional colonialism in which I replace your experience with my imagined version of it and call the result “understanding.”