There are people I have loved for decades I can no longer fully reach.
Not because we have become strangers to each other in the way time and distance create estrangement. But because something has come between us - a mechanism, an expectation, a demand - that neither of us actually chose, but both of us feel.
It always starts with an issue. A war, a name, an election.
And before the conversation has really begun, there is already a question in the air - not asked directly, but present nonetheless - about whether I am with or against. And if I answer with a nuance, a pause, an "it's more complex than that," it is not read as honesty.
It is read as betrayal.
That is where the sorrow begins for me.
Not the anger - the sorrow. Because anger presupposes an enemy. Sorrow presupposes there was something to lose.
There was.
And there is.
Something to lose.
I do not believe the people I love have become evil. Or morally corrupted. I think they - we - have been caught in something they cannot themselves see. A form of thinking that presents itself as moral clarity - as courage, as consequence, as "standing for something" - but which is actually something else.
A Machine that DEMANDS you choose sides. Constantly. And which punishes those who remain standing.
But there is something that makes it all even more confusing. And even more sorrowful.
Because we still speak the same words. Freedom. Justice. Tolerance. Community. The words are the same - but what they point to is no longer the same. And none of us received a letter saying the coordinate system had been redrawn. And many have gradually allowed themselves to be moved in their understanding of them, without understanding the consequence.
The understanding of freedom that once permeated Western consciousness was not about self-definition. It was about the capacity to act in accordance with one's nature and one's conscience - a freedom that presupposed something to be free in relation to.
Justice was not equality of outcome, but proportionality.
Tolerance was not affirmation of everything, but bearing disagreement with dignity - precisely because you took the other seriously enough not to have to agree with him.
Those definitions have not quietly slipped away. They have been replaced. And now we sit with the same vocabulary and two completely different worlds behind it. The conversation does not break down because people are evil. It breaks down because language itself - the Word - is undermined from within - and neither party knows it while it is happening.
That makes the anger harder to maintain. You cannot keep being angry at someone for using a map that has been redrawn without them knowing it. But the sorrow does not become less for that reason. It just becomes more precise.
What is stolen from us in this period is not only the relation. What is stolen is the gaze. The ability to see the world as it actually is - full of contradictory truths, of people who are right in their pain and wrong in their conclusion, of causes that have victims on both sides. Being able to hold all of that at once is not relativism. It is precision. And it is the only gaze that actually sees.
But that gaze requires that you can remain standing. That you do not jump to judgment. That you bear sitting with the unresolved long enough to understand it.
And that capacity is disappearing. Not because people have become stupid or indifferent. But because an entire infrastructure has been built up around us that rewards the opposite. The algorithms live off division. The political class lives off enemy images. Business lives off lies. And we have all, slowly and almost imperceptibly, become consumers of a machine we did not ask to be placed into.
The civilisational loss is this -
A people who no longer share a common coordinate system - not just for politics, but for the very words that were supposed to make conversation possible - gradually lose the ability to distinguish between a real threat and a person who simply sees differently. It uses all its strength on internal judgments. And has none left for what actually requires common orientation.
But that is not where I feel it first and heaviest.
I feel it at the table. In the phone that does not ring. In the conversation that ended too early, because neither of us wanted to say what was needed to get through to each other again.
It is not ideology I grieve over.
It is people.
The human being.
Because the human being still remembers - if we will let it - how to look at each other without first asking about sides.
We were that once.
We can become it again.
If we will.
❤️🔥🪽
