I saw a video showing a girls’ school in Iran being bombed, and for a moment, my body registered it. I felt the horror, the rage, the deep instinct that something sacred had been violated.
I went to an all-girls school myself. I know what those classrooms hold: ambition, laughter, and the beautiful beginnings of young women learning who they are becoming.
And yet, after a few seconds, I did something that stopped me cold later. I scrolled. Not because I didn’t care or it wasn’t horrifying, but because I was hoping the next video would show something easier to digest like a puppy running through grass or a tarot reader promising my dream opportunity was finally arriving.
I moved on quickly, and that moment has stayed with me because I am a painfully empathetic woman. I feel everything so deeply and care about the state of the world.
And yet even I, someone who believes women’s lives are sacred, someone who knows what it means to sit in a girls’ classroom and dream about the future, watched a school being bombed and kept scrolling.
It made me remember how much we are all being conditioned, and that is also truly horrifying.
There is an unsettling phenomenon happening right now that few people are willing to name.
It’s not just corruption, or violence, or political chaos. Human history has always contained those things.
What feels different today is the quiet normalization of what should never become normal.
Every day our screens deliver images of bombings, exploitation, corruption, and human suffering on a massive scale. For a moment, there may be outrage. There may be a flurry of posts, comments, and hot takes.
And then the moment passes.
The story disappears into the endless stream of content, and life goes on.
Something in us has learned how to move on too quickly.
Psychologists sometimes call this moral disengagement, which is the process by which people gradually detach from their own moral instincts. It doesn’t usually happen through one shocking event. It happens slowly, through repetition and exposure.
When disturbing things happen often enough, they stop feeling disturbing.
When cruelty becomes constant background noise, it starts to feel like part of the landscape. When that happens, people don’t stop knowing right from wrong.
They simply stop reacting to it.
This is the subtle danger of the information age. We are exposed to more suffering, more conflict, and more scandal than any generation before us. At first, this exposure was supposed to make us more aware and more compassionate.
But there is a limit to how much the human nervous system can process.
When the stream of crisis never ends, many people unconsciously protect themselves the only way they know how: by becoming numb.
You see it in the way people scroll past tragedies that once would have stopped them in their tracks.
You see it in how quickly conversations move from outrage to distraction.
You see it in the quiet resignation that creeps into everyday language: “That’s just the way the world is.”
But deep down, most people still know that isn’t true.
There is still a part of us that recognizes injustice when we see it, and understands that human life, dignity, and truth should matter more than spectacle or profit.
That moral instinct hasn’t disappeared.
It’s simply been buried beneath the constant noise.
The real danger of moral amnesia is not that people suddenly become evil. It’s that they slowly forget what their own conscience once felt like.
They forget what it felt like to be shocked.
They forget what it felt like to care deeply.
They forget that indifference is not the natural state of a healthy society.
Every era in history has faced moments like this — periods when ordinary people were forced to decide whether they would stay awake to what was happening around them, or passively adapt to it.
History rarely judges societies by their rhetoric. It judges them by their tolerance.
What did people learn to accept?
What did they learn to ignore?
What did they convince themselves was normal?
The most dangerous cultural shift is not the presence of wrongdoing. It is the gradual lowering of the collective moral bar.
When the unacceptable becomes routine, consciousness becomes disruptive. And yet, moral clarity is not as complicated as it sounds. It begins with something very simple: refusing to pretend that cruelty is normal, refusing to treat human suffering like background noise, and refusing to abandon the voice inside that still recognizes the difference between right and wrong.
In an age of information and misinformation overload, the real act of courage may simply be remembering:
Remembering what our moral instincts once told us.
Remembering that human dignity is not negotiable.
Remembering that the normalization of inhumanity is something societies slowly drift into when enough people decide it is easier not to notice.
We cannot control everything happening in the world. But in a time of moral amnesia, the most powerful act may be refusing to forget what we know is wrong.
The danger isn’t that we don’t know better. It’s that we’ve learned how to live as if we don’t.
If this resonated, feel free to tap the heart so I know it landed. And if you have a reflection, I’d love to hear what it stirred in you. Sharing it with someone who might need it is always appreciated.
Many years ago on a business trip I stayed at a hotel in Mumbai, India. A week after I left, terrorists attacked the hotel killing many people. I called up my colleagues in India to see if they were ok. They said people are back to their everyday lives, they are sitting outside the hotel at tables having lunch, with bullet holes in the walls.
Remember 911, and what it was like in the US at that time. The reaction to other tragic events in certain parts of the world happens with much more frequency.
My dad was a navigator on a B29 bomber, and flew in 36 combat missions in World War II. He flew in the last bombing run over Japan, days after the last atomic bomb was dropped. As they flew out on their bombing run, they thought they were going to get an order over the radio that the war was over and to drop the bombs in the ocean and return to base. No radio message was received until they had dropped their bombs and were returning to their base. Thousands of civilians were killed. My dad suffered from PTSD.
I live in Minneapolis, MN, where in recent years we had violence and protests that made national news for weeks. In poetry club we were prompted to write an 8 word poem. I wrote.
WHO AM I?
Nameless violence ,
Crowd’s fearful silence,
One’s shameful conscience.
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I wish there was an answer….
Brilliant Kate!
Too good not to share.