The Dispatch

I didn't want to write this today.

I thought about just skipping this edition and taking the morning off. I didn't want to be part of a news cycle where a head of state can say "a whole civilization will die tonight" and it just… scrolls past. Another notification. Another headline to swipe away between coffee and a meeting.

I couldn't do it. Have you seen the news? The plans for today? The actions already taken this morning?

I know what some of you are already typing. "Yeah, but what about their crimes against humanity — what about [X], [Y], [Z]."

And to that I say: I'm sick of it. Genuinely sick of it.

Whataboutism isn't an argument. It's a crutch we reach for when we've run out of the courage to sit with something uncomfortable, which is this: threatening to annihilate a civilization of human beings is wrong.

Full stop. No asterisk. No "but first, consider the context."

Terrible things done by a government do not write a blank cheque for the obliteration of the people living under it.

This isn't a political post. I'm not here to hand out jerseys or tell you who the good guys are. I genuinely don't think that's the useful conversation right now.

This is just me, a person who writes about rocks pulled out of the ground for a living, stopping for a second to say the people over there are the same as you and me. Born onto a rock hurtling through space, trying to figure it out. They have bad days. They stress about work and bills. They worry about their kids.

And right now some of them are forming human chains around power plants because they don't know what else to do.

Read that last line again, it’s accurate.

Moral and just nations don't strike civilian infrastructure. They don't target power plants, water treatment facilities, and bridges, because that kills innocent people who had no vote, no voice, and no say in any of this.

We can disagree about a lot of things. But "should we threaten the mass annihilation of millions of people" really shouldn't be one of them.

Open the Strait of Hormuz or we'll murder your civilians.

That's the sentence. Written plainly, that's what's being said today.

It's not always good guys versus bad guys. Both sides can be wrong. Both sides can be bad. And the willingness to say that out loud, without flinching, without reaching for the whataboutism crutch, is the bare minimum we owe each other right now.

-Lee