When Horror Becomes Routine: The Descent Into Numbness
Refusing to Accept a World Where Atrocities Become Background Noise
I’m sitting here thinking about everything we’re seeing, everything that keeps coming out of Gaza, and I’m realizing how messed up it is that any of this feels familiar. I don’t mean acceptable — I mean familiar. Like my brain has started filing these images into some category of “I’ve seen this before,” and that scares me. It scares me because I never wanted to be someone who could look at a baby torn apart by an Israeli missile and feel anything less than full-body shock. But here we are. And I hate that. I hate that this terrorist colony has managed to make the unthinkable feel routine.
I keep thinking about how three years ago, one image like this would have broken the internet. It would have broken us. We would have been shaking, crying, unable to sleep. And now? Now it’s like, “Oh, another bombing. Another tent hit. Another family buried under rubble.” I still feel horror, but it’s not the same kind of horror. It’s not that gut punch that knocks the wind out of you. It’s like the shock has been worn down by repetition. And I hate that I even have to admit that.
And I know this isn’t an accident. I know this is exactly what the predator class — the Epstein class of this world, the people who treat human beings like disposable objects — wants. They want us numb. They want us scrolling past body parts like it’s weather updates. They want us to lose the ability to feel the full weight of what’s happening so they can keep doing it without resistance. Because if people stop reacting, they stop fighting. And if they stop fighting, the people in power get to keep killing without consequence.
I catch myself seeing an image — a father holding half of his child, a mother screaming over a pile of rubble that used to be her home — and I know I’ve seen it before. Not the exact one, but the same kind of scene. The same kind of grief. The same kind of destruction. And that’s the problem. These images start blending together, and that blending is its own kind of violence. It’s like the world is being trained to accept genocide as a normal part of the news cycle.
And I don’t want to live in a world like that. I don’t want to live in a world where human suffering is minimized to the point where we just shrug and say, “Again?” I don’t want to live in a world where a whole population being slaughtered in real time — in 4K, on our phones, in our hands — becomes something we scroll past on our way to a recipe video. I don’t want to live in a world where the innocence we had, or whatever version of innocence we thought we had, is gone because we’ve been forced to watch genocide like it’s a livestream.
I don’t know how we take it back. I don’t know how we go back to being human in the way we were before all this. Maybe we can’t. Maybe the world has crossed some line that can’t be uncrossed. But I know this: I don’t want to accept this numbness as the new normal. I don’t want to let the shock fade. I don’t want to let the people doing this — the predator class, the ones who benefit from endless war and endless suffering — win by wearing us down.
I want to feel it again. I want the world to feel it again. I want us to refuse to let this become routine. Because once we accept this level of horror as normal, we lose something we can’t get back. We lose the part of us that recognizes the value of a single human life. We lose the part of us that knows a baby in pieces should stop the world in its tracks. We lose the part of us that says, “No, this is not how humans are supposed to live.”
And maybe that’s why I do what I do. Every day, I highlight the campaigns of individual families in Gaza—whether they need food, medical help, milk, diapers, or whatever crisis they’re facing. Each of those daily pushes is personal, and it’s separate from the bigger initiative we started, the Gaza’s Forgotten Families. Maybe this is as much about saving my own soul as it is about helping them. I’m fighting against this numbness, I’m refusing to dehumanize them, and in doing that, I’m making sure I don’t lose my own humanity. It’s not just about helping them survive; it’s about making sure I stay human in the face of all of this.
So to the question: how do we go back to being human? I don’t have the answer. But I know the first step is refusing to let this numbness settle in. Refusing to let repetition turn genocide into background noise. Refusing to let the world convince us that this is just how things are now.
Because the moment we stop feeling, they win. And I’m not letting them win.
Amazing stuff Kathy.
Really powerful, Kathy. 🫂