The Cruel Joke
...I can't even.
Some mornings in America feel less like waking up in a country and more like stumbling into the prologue of a dystopian novel you don’t remember agreeing to read. The hypocrisy is so thick you could ladle it into bowls and serve it as soup. And yet, people slurp it up, some with gusto, others with resignation, pretending it’s nourishment. Today was one of those mornings, when Facebook reminded me that I’d wandered into a carnival of grief and sanctimony around the tragic death of Charlie Kirk. A martyr, a saint, a headline to be canonized by the same political movement that thrives on outrage like oxygen.
Now, a death is always tragic. That has to be said. Loss of life is loss of possibility, and the circle of pain that radiates out from any death is undeniable. But to see the deification of a man who made a career out of weaponizing cruelty, telling young people that stoning was God’s ultimate punishment for being gay, arguing that murder is a fair price to pay for unfettered gun ownership, stirring college campuses into fevered confusion just to score cheap outrage points, well, forgive me if I don’t light a candle. You spew hatred, you receive hatred. It’s not fucking rocket science.
And yet here we are, pretending it’s some grand mystery why America feels like a land perpetually on the brink. Having a gay daughter, asking for the bare minimum of human dignity in healthcare, food, shelter, things that, ironically, Jesus spent his whole ministry banging on about, brands me a “pinko commie,” or worse, a “progressive lib” to be owned. Owned! As though compassion were a weakness, empathy a defect. This country has always been built on hatred, and the rare moments of unity, 9/11, Katrina, were born of catastrophe, not conscience. When children are slaughtered in classrooms, the unity fractures back into “thoughts and prayers.” Because taking away weapons from the unhinged is somehow the truly radical idea. And that includes deranged killers of right-wing pundits.
You feel it in your bones, that question you don’t want to ask out loud: how much longer can you keep living in a place where your family’s very existence is politicized? Where loving your child, as they are, is a rebellion? Where safety and sanity feel like luxuries reserved for some imaginary future state that never quite arrives? That’s where the expat dream stops being a fantasy and starts being survival planning.
Because the truth is, cruelty isn’t some unfortunate byproduct of America; it’s the engine. It’s what keeps the machine humming. The spectacle of pain, of domination, of reducing human lives to bargaining chips, that’s not an accident, it’s a feature. We’ve grown so accustomed to it that we mistake it for normalcy, like a background hum you only notice when the power goes out. Hatred here doesn’t just happen, it’s manufactured, packaged, broadcast, and monetized. And then we wonder, with hand-to-forehead bewilderment, why the air feels toxic, why the ground feels unsteady, why we no longer recognize the country beneath our feet.
We are told to call it freedom. Freedom to bear arms, freedom to speak venom, freedom to trample others in the name of preserving some mythic heritage. But it’s a strange kind of freedom when it leaves you checking over your shoulder, bracing yourself every time your child walks out the door, calculating whether today will be the day when some zealot decides that their God, their grievance, their gun is worth more than a life. This isn’t freedom. It’s fear dressed up in patriotic drag.
And yet, somehow, we keep playing along. We hang flags, we recite pledges, we participate in the ritual of pretending this house isn’t burning down around us. We perform belief in a system that has long since stopped believing in us. Maybe that’s the cruelest joke of all: that we keep telling ourselves the punchline is coming, that any day now we’ll break the cycle, that tragedy will finally spur change. But deep down, we know better. We know the script by heart.
I don’t have an answer. I don’t know what comes next. But I do know this: when cruelty becomes the baseline, when hatred is the currency, when your child’s existence is treated as negotiable, you can’t just keep nodding along as though this is fine. You start to wonder, you start to plot, you start to whisper the unthinkable: maybe the only way to survive the joke is to stop laughing at it.
And if you’re reading this, and you feel that same weight in your chest, that same quiet dread that this country has calcified into something unlivable, then you know what I mean. The question isn’t whether we can endure it. The question is why we should.