peacenow

Last night I watched a film, and it deeply unsettled me. It was USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage — a story about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the unimaginable suffering of the sailors left drifting at sea. The film wants you to grieve for them — and you do. You see their fear, their thirst, their desperation. You feel the cruelty of the ocean and the silence that followed their desperate calls for help.
But something about it would not let me rest. That ship had just delivered parts of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, erasing entire cities and killing countless civilians. Yet the film focuses almost entirely on the tragedy at sea, and on the inner guilt of a captain and a submariner, as if their suffering were somehow equal.
I understand the intention — war wounds everyone — but there is a world of difference between losing one’s life at sea and delivering a weapon that erased whole neighborhoods and generations. Grief made intimate on screen should never erase the memory of burned cities off camera.
And the unease I felt in that theater didn’t stay in the theater. It followed me into today. As I scroll through the news, there are real fears that a major military strike could happen “at any time” — not in some distant war film, but in the real world, involving the United States and Iran, with warplanes, aircraft carriers and combat jets being moved into position and political leaders talking openly about a “limited attack” they are still deciding on.
Meanwhile in Gaza, people continue to live under bombardment, hospitals run short of supplies, homes lie in ruins, and civilians — children, parents, grandparents — are caught in the crossfire of a conflict they did not choose.
It made me think: why do we humanize one tragedy so vividly — the faces of a few hundred sailors — while other tragedies, affecting tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians, barely register emotionally until they become headlines? Why do we internalize one story but distance ourselves from another?
I’m not writing this to diminish anyone’s grief. Every loss of life is a wound. But empathy shouldn’t be selective or framed by nationality or narrative. Grief should not depend on which side of an ocean someone stood. And in a world where war is not just historical content but a real, looming possibility for millions today, we owe it to ourselves to recognize all that suffering — equally, humanly, without borders.
#PeaceNow