As I watched scores of panic-stricken fathers in Iran, bloodying their hands, desperately tearing through the hulking rubble entombing their children, I grieved deeply.

I mourned over their valiant but futile efforts to extricate life from beneath the crushing carnage surrounding them.

I mourned the senseless destruction of dozens of radiant young lives eradicated in the span of a heartbeat by a nameless, faceless terror from the sky.

I mourned for a beautiful people whose unprovoked trauma and undeserved suffering mean nothing to a substantial portion of my country, who simply do not care for brown-skinned, foreign human beings.

And I mourned the fact that no matter what happens in the coming hours and days, America has already lost the real wars, long before this moment.

We have lost the war to prevent tens of millions of our parents, siblings, lifelong friends, and neighbors from abandoning human empathy, discarding critical thinking, and falling into a thick, impenetrable cultic stupor from which facts, data, or the obliterated bodies of Iranian schoolchildren cannot retrieve them.

We have lost the war to prevent people we love and once respected from becoming morally-addled by a whitewashed myth of national exceptionalism that has rendered them with little value for those beyond the tightly-closed, fiercely-guarded borders of their calloused hearts.

We have lost the war to ensure that we did not place our nation’s fate into the bruised and jittery hands of a classless, bottom-feeding, race-baiting, empty husk of a human being, whose eight decades on this planet have not yielded one noble impulse or benevolent act.

We have lost the war to collectively choose wisely between an intelligent, experienced woman of color and a narcissistic, convicted felon and court-adjudicated white male rapist, and now find ourselves teetering precariously on the edge of authoritarianism.

We have lost the war to keep the people we live and work, study and worship alongside from being swallowed up by a blind tribal allegiance to party and country that runs solely on stoked fears and curated prejudices.

We have lost the war to live in a nation that believes human beings thousands of miles away are as sacred and as worthy of defense as those within arm’s reach.

We have lost the war to keep from normalizing the prolific atrocities of an untethered madman and his cadre of emboldened bigots, whose inhumanity is unabated.

We have lost the war to create a nation where mass murders, protected pedophiles, and masked mercenaries are alarming and not commonplace.

We have lost the war to live in a nation where all people recognize when a sitting president launches a brutal act of lawless military aggression simply to avoid legal accountability for his sexual crimes against girls and women, and the political reckoning of a free and fair election.

The unconstitutional, illegal, unethical, and immoral bombing of the Iranian people is not a war; it is the latest deadly symptom of a diseased Republic whose leaders feel no obligation to the Laws of our nation or to the higher laws governing decent human beings.

It is yet another manifestation of the collective heart sickness afflicting tens of millions of people who call this place home, a moral cancer that chokes out compassion and metastasizes cruelty.

Our bleeding, barely breathing two-hundred-and-fifty-year experiment in democracy is now lying beneath the crushing rubble of billions of tiny compromises, turned heads, shared sins, allowed injustices, and avoided confrontations.

I wonder if we can still win the war to emancipate it.

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