Westerners are able to hold this compartmentalized video game mentality about war because war isn’t something that happens to us. We’ve never had bombs dropped on our neighborhoods. We’ve never had the experience of seeing a severed hand on the ground after an explosion and trying to figure out who it belonged to. We’ve never had the experience of seeing our child’s shredded body after a blast and thinking about how we’d carefully helped them dress that precious body for school just hours before.

Reading by Tim Foley.