I used to think decisions of war were made
in rooms with gravitas.
But then I realized—
they can happen in group chats with disappearing texts.
That’s when I stopped picturing strategy as solemn
and started noticing how casual the language of violence becomes
when no one expects to be held accountable.
Not all recklessness is loud.
Sometimes, it just clicks “Send.”
—
And when recklessness is exposed,
it doesn’t always lead to reckoning.
Sometimes, it leads to staging.
A press conference, not a confession.
A performance of certainty—
scripted, soundbitten, rehearsed.
They don’t correct the record.
They rewrite the scene.
Blame the app.
Blame the staffer.
Blame the lighting, the leak, the clock.
As if lies lose weight
when lit just right
and delivered with poise.
—
At first, I thought the real danger was the breach.
But there was no breach—
just carelessness,
then cover-up.
What followed wasn’t crisis control.
It was story control.
The truth wasn’t just denied—
it was disfigured,
bent into something implausible,
repeated
until people either stopped listening
or started doubting their own eyes.
—
Screenshots.
Timelines.
Coordinates.
Laughter.
Sharp, dissonant, wrong.
Then denial.
Not just of content,
but of consequence.
As if the lives that could have been lost
were footnotes in a press release.
—
I kept circling back to one image:
someone typing out the timing of missiles
on a phone set to auto-delete.
A war, whispered—
between emojis and slurs,
its trail scrubbed clean
by a four-week expiration clock.
—
We’ve all learned to expect spin from politics.
But this wasn’t spin.
This was a campaign of erasure—
not just of messages,
but of memory,
of responsibility,
of cost.
This wasn’t about national security.
It was about moral infrastructure
collapsing in real time.
—
And I kept wondering:
What kind of culture produces leaders
who think they can plan war
like it’s a calendar entry—
and then deny it
with a shrug and a smirk?
—
I used to think secrecy was about protection.
Now I see how easily it becomes a shield—
not to safeguard lives,
but to obscure truth.
To preserve narratives.
To quietly decide
who gets to forget,
and who must carry what’s been done.
—
I remember excusing a friend’s lie
because it felt easier than challenging it—
because silence, at the time,
seemed harmless.
I told myself it was small.
It wasn’t.
It stayed with me longer than I expected—
like a smudge I kept noticing,
even after I tried to forget.
—
There is no Signal for the soul.
No disappearing message function for harm.
No encryption strong enough to conceal what happens
when people in power believe their words are weightless—
because no one expects them
to leave a trace.
—
So I look differently now—
not just at the reckless,
but at the rehearsed.
At the briefings.
At the curated denials.
At the flood of noise
designed to unmake the truth.
—
And I keep thinking:
If a war can begin
with a disappearing message—
and be buried beneath
a disappearing lie—
what happens
when the truth itself
is treated like an inconvenience?
And if we stop believing
that truth matters at all—
what, then,
will we have left to rebuild with?
No memory.
No weight.
Just a room full of noise.