Honestly, I couldn’t handle not writing about this topic today. It might sound a little emotional. However, if we strip ourselves of emotions, we become literally inhuman. There was a time when the world felt connected to what was happening around us. We felt anchored when suffering was met with solidarity, and leadership meant responsibility, not political optics emulating a Hollywood celebrity lifestyle. Today, that anchor has been cut loose. And while we, the very few who still despair, watch our politicians, we are forced to accept their selective outrage, their rehearsed empathy for the cameras, and a terrifying normalisation of human suffering. Indeed, the world has changed. People have changed. And not in the way we hoped.
We are witnessing atrocities that should shake the foundations of any civilised society. I’m not sure if politicians follow the same media I do, but I can’t bear watching children, mothers, and the elderly being murdered in places once deemed safe, or worse, designated as safe to move away from bombardments and then they become targets. The streets that once echoed with laughter now reverberate with cries of despair. And yet, the silence from the European Union is deafening. We are talking about the same EU that reacted with hysteria to the invasion of Ukraine, which now stands muted in the face of horrors unfolding in the Middle East. Where is the moral compass? Where is the consistency?
Back in October 2023, I wrote that the presence of Ursula von der Leyen in the Middle East risked unfolding into a humanitarian crisis. The biggest mistake was the blessing that spiralled into an abyss, one that the EU helped create. That abyss is no longer hypothetical; it is here, confronting us daily through the media. Von der Leyen, who has monopolised the EU’s foreign affairs agenda, must answer for this absence. The mascot of EU sanctions on Russia now seems paralysed in the face of horror. How do these leaders sleep at night? How does one reconcile the comfort of their diplomatic chambers – and ahem the free rent in the Berlaymont Building – with the images of lifeless children pulled from rubble? I cannot. Even the thought of witnessing such atrocities would deprive me of sleep, of peace, of conscience. I still remember when the Syrian Opposition in Assad’s time visited the Political and Security Committee, showing us footage of children being pulled from the rubble. I felt physically ill, and it disturbed me for an entire week. If politicians cannot feel empathy in the face of such suffering, then they have no place in public service. Leadership without compassion is not leadership at all.
We are told that civilians must not bear the brunt of terrorist groups. And yet, they do on a daily basis. Children who never voted, who never chose sides, are paying the price for decisions made in rooms they’ll never enter. The heartaches we scroll past on social media – well, once shocking, now a routine – have shaped our perception of suffering. We’ve become desensitised. Tragedy has become normalised, and grief is just a trend that politicians seem to settle with. Worse, social media, once a tool for connection, has morphed into a stage for curated empathy, where you see politicians in their rehearsed, staged set-up behind the camera. It’s all not making sense. Despairingly, politicians have become influencers, more concerned with how they look than what they do. Some of them are looking even more like the Kardashians’ style of politics, rather than political leaders with gravitas. They are overly made-up with Botox fillers and augmented lips. The electorate, meanwhile, bears the brunt of this madness. We are governed by optics catering for social media, not ethics, taking into consideration the algorithms of Facebook and the rest of social media rather than accountability.
The EU’s silence is not just a political failure; it is a moral one. When Ukraine was invaded, the response was swift and loud. Sanctions, speeches, solidarity, and colour-coded outfits in yellow and blue were imposed on the female EU Commissioners during the State of the Union speech in 2022. It’s become a show for the cameras. But when children are bombed in Gaza, when hospitals are reduced to rubble, when safe zones become death traps, the response is indifferent, vague, and often absent, and they do not even feature in black outfits to resonate grief. This double standard is not lost on the world. It is not lost on history. And history will judge the current EU leaders.
Let’s not pin all of this on politicians alone, because the electorate is also divided at times. However, when ordinary citizens like me watch this tragedy unfold, they feel helpless. And many feel betrayed. No wonder that many of us are not chasing the urban life anymore and choose nature over technology and the illusion of progress. After doing the full circle, people are telling me, “We’ve tried it, we’ve been there, but nature is never wrong” and we are finding solace in nature, in simplicity, in the very things we once abandoned. How ironic! We left the rural for the urban, traded soil for greed and screens, and now, in search of peace, we go back to where it all began. Perhaps it’s true; everything ends right where it begins. This return to nature is not just a lifestyle choice; it is a form of either quiet rebellion or escapism. A rejection of the noise, the cruelty, the staged empathy that defines our age. Oh, at this rate, the Agriculture Ministry might find itself busier than expected, if the current trajectory of rising demand for natural spaces persists. Well, it is a reminder that humanity is not a hashtag.
Certainly, we must ask ourselves what future we want for our children, and what kind of world we are building. The normalisation of suffering is perhaps the most dangerous shift of all. When we see images of bombed schools and lifeless bodies and feel nothing, we have lost something essential in humanity. When we scroll past grief as if it were just another post, we have surrendered our humanity. And yet, the leaders remain absent. The EU institutions remain silent. The EU, which prides itself on human rights and democratic values, has failed to uphold them when it matters most. The hypocrisy is glaring, and the consequences are truly deadly. I do not normally write this from a place of anger alone. I write it from a place of heartbreak and of deep concern. Of restless nights spent wondering how we got here, and how we allowed this to happen. How we became so numb.
Perhaps those reading this article might say that I am simply not normal because this is the trend and how desensitised we’ve become. We normalised evil in the face of helpless people. There is no justification for the murder of civilians. There is no excuse for the silence of those in power. And there is no future in a world that treats human life as dispensable. We must demand more from our leaders and also from ourselves. We cannot expect politicians to act if we are desensitised as much as they are. We must remember that behind every statistic there is a story, behind every image there is a soul, and perhaps someone who could have saved your life in the future. The world has changed. However, it is not too late to change it again. Let us not be remembered as the generation that normalised suffering. Because if we don’t act, history will not be kind, and our conscience will not be quiet.
