This Post Won't Save the World

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

A colleague emailed me this week; someone I hadn’t heard from in a while. He was curious if I’d written anything about Iran (I hadn’t). He told me he has students serving in the military. That he’s scared. And that he’s angry.

Since he reached out, I’ve been sitting with the question of whether I have anything useful to say on the topic. Is it the time to remind people to avoid the Certainty Trap? That, regardless of your opinion on the U.S. and Iran, it’s important not to demonize or morally condemn people who disagree? I could write that piece and write it honestly—given it’s what I actually believe.

And yet, when I sat down to write, I realized that, while that statement is true, it’s not really a description of what I think or feel when I see the headlines. So, while I don’t know if what follows will be useful, it will, at the very least, be honest.

***

What I don’t feel in this moment is outrage. Not at Trump, Hegseth, the Iranian regime, or anyone else for that matter. And I wonder what that says about me; whether I’m not feeling the one thing I’m supposed to—the thing that a good person would—at this moment.

Here’s what I do feel.

For starters, I feel scared. The reasons for this are probably obvious. Like so many people, I worry that this conflict will escalate to an apocalyptic, existential, World War III event. I fear what the future holds for my teenage kids. What kind of world will they inherit? Could this lead to a draft that affects them? What does real economic destruction look like? I get lost in the sheer number of things I take for granted every single day that could vanish in the blink of an eye. I go to the grocery store and expect that the shelves will be stocked. I flip a light switch and assume the electricity will come on. And if, God forbid, I have to call 911, I assume that someone will answer and someone will come. But what if everything I assume will always be there is actually deeply, heartbreakingly, fragile?

And I feel sad. I feel sad for the people everywhere—including in Iran and Israel—who are going about their lives and already live with the answer to the question I just posed. Yes, everything really is that fragile. Life can actually be that fragile.

I also feel something harder to admit; it’s a thought, a question really, about whether war is just something humans do to each other, whether it’s unavoidable. And I’m not sure if that thought is wisdom or resignation.

Last, I feel a kind of dizzying awareness of my own undeserved luck. I’m watching the headlines roll in from my comfortable desk, in my house, in a country that isn’t on fire. Not because I did something good or right. Just because of where and when I was born. And I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know that it’s helpful (or necessarily accurate) to lean into the idea the circumstances of birth determine everything in life. And I also can’t shake the recognition that I didn’t earn THIS. Where exactly the line is between luck and agency, between the randomness of birth and the choices that follow from it—I genuinely don’t know. And this moment makes that uncertainty harder to sit with, not easier.

But feelings aren’t verdicts. And if a verdict is what people want to hear, I can’t provide one.

To be sure, it may well be true that Trump is surrounded by sycophants and “yes” men and that he’s chased away all the people who would have reined in his baser impulses. And yet, even if that’s the case, that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t know the right answers to questions like: Was the alternative—continued diplomacy, containment—clearly better? Was the diplomatic track going anywhere? What would “responsible” or “reasonable” action have looked like?

If you read those and think you know the right answers—the one decision that a competent, decent administration would obviously have made—I’d ask you to sit with that certainty for a moment. Not because I’m defending what happened or what’s going on. But because what I see when I look at this honestly isn’t a clear choice between right and wrong. It’s tradeoffs. Painful, uncertain, potentially catastrophic tradeoffs, with no option that doesn’t carry serious costs. That’s not a defense of anyone. It’s just what is.

Maybe this is a Certainty Trap piece after all. Just not the one I thought I'd write.