A post about moral clarity, selective empathy, and the crimes we refuse to name.
I woke up angry this week. Not the loud kind of angry. The quiet kind — the kind that sits in your chest while you make your coffee and asks you a question you can’t put down:
When did evil become negotiable?
I thought evil was clear-cut. There is wrong, and there is right. That’s what I was taught. That’s what I believed everyone believed. But the world I’m watching doesn’t work that way. In the world I’m watching, some crimes are crimes — and other crimes get a lawyer, a backstory, and a standing ovation.
The actor
A few weeks ago, I watched a TV series based on a true story. Police officers terrorized an entire city. Families destroyed. Innocent men sent to prison. Children raised without parents. People robbed of their dignity, taught to flinch at the sight of a uniform.
One of the actors played one of those officers. And when he was asked about his character — this man who terrorized his own community — do you know what he said?
“It’s not my place to judge. He was complicated. He was a human being who made wrong decisions. Something must have happened to him.”
An entire buffet of empathy. Context served warm. Nuance on the house.
Fast forward a few years. People who look like that actor experience an act of terror. And this same man — the one who could find compassion for a terrorist in a uniform — suddenly cannot imagine what would push a human being to violence. Now there is no context. No history. No “something must have happened.” Now they are simply animals. Unfit for society. End of discussion.
Same man. Same heart. Two completely different settings on the empathy machine.
The machine has an owner
Here is what I finally understood, and it’s the thing I can’t unsee:
Context is not distributed by logic. It is distributed by who is holding the camera.
When the perpetrator looks familiar, we get the full documentary treatment — the childhood, the pressure, the complicated circumstances, the gentle voiceover reminding us that good men can be pushed to do terrible things. And that last part is true, by the way. Good people can be pushed to the brink. Threaten someone’s family, their freedom, their livelihood, their land — and watch what a human being becomes. Most of us have no idea what we would do.
But when the perpetrator looks unfamiliar, the documentary is cancelled. The clock starts on the day they reacted — never on the decades of what was done to them. Nobody asks what it does to a person to be searched like a criminal every day of their life. To raise children under duress on their own ancestral land. To wake up every single morning already fighting.
I know I don’t want that life. I don’t want to open my eyes and immediately calculate who I need to defend myself from today. Nobody wants that life. So when I see people driven to the unthinkable, my first question is not “what is wrong with them?” My first question is: what was the original crime?
The erased first chapter
Because there is always an original crime. And erasing it is the whole trick.
If you delete the first chapter of any story, the second chapter looks insane. That is how the machine works. The original theft, the original violence, the original humiliation — erased, unnamed, off the record. Then when the response comes, it arrives in the news as a bolt from a clear blue sky. Senseless. Unprovoked. Evil.
And when someone dares to reopen the first chapter — a writer, a historian, a person with a pen and a memory — they become the threat. Imagine that. A human being who never raised a hand against anyone, who simply wrote the truth down, labeled a terrorist. Who exactly did they terrorize? A sentence? A timeline? The comfort of people who preferred the shorter story?
Meanwhile, the loudest voices in the world lecture everyone else about freedom. Freedom of speech, human rights, justice — day and night — while calling other leaders, despots for doing a fraction of what they themselves do in broad daylight. The hypocrisy isn’t even hidden anymore. It’s the format.
What I’m not saying
Let me be precise, because precision is the only weapon I have here.
I am not asking for empathy to be taken away from anyone. I am not saying the complicated officer deserves no understanding, or that any act of violence against innocent people is good. Violence against the innocent is a tragedy every single time, no matter whose innocents they are.
What I am saying is this: either everyone gets context, or nobody does.
Either every perpetrator has a history, or none of them do. Either every victim is grievable, or the word “victim” means nothing. You do not get to run the empathy machine for people who look like you and unplug it for everyone else. That is not morality. That is tribalism wearing morality’s clothes.
The answer to selective empathy is not to flip the selection. It is to refuse the selection entirely.
We live in a loud world
We live in a loud world. The same voices repeat the same programming until wrong begins to sound reasonable — and the people brave enough to name the wrong begin to sound dangerous.
So, I am inviting myself — and you — to stay curious. Go back in history. Resist being swept away by whatever breaking news appears in your feed first, loudest, or most often.
Ask better questions before accepting the story being handed to you:
- Who is giving you the news?
- Who is funding them?
- What are their politics?
- Who do they support?
- What agenda might shape the story they are telling?
I will keep asking for chapter one. When I hear about a “senseless” act, I will ask what came before it. Not to excuse it — to understand it. Those are not the same thing, no matter how many times we are told they are.
Here is what I am committing to:
I will watch my own empathy machine. Where does mine switch off? Whose pain do I skim past? Selective empathy is not only a problem out there. It is also a setting inside every one of us — one that was installed without our permission. And what was installed can be edited.
I will not outsource my moral clarity. Not to the news cycle. Not to the loudest voice. Not to whoever holds the camera. Clear is clear. Wrong is wrong — including when it is done by people who look like me, speak like me, or pray like me. Especially then.
Because if my sense of right and wrong changes depending on who is in the frame, then I never had a moral compass. I had a team jersey.
Journal prompts for this week
- Think of a time you extended deep understanding to someone “on your side.” Now think of a time you withheld it from someone who wasn’t. What was actually different — the act, or the actor?
- Whose “chapter one” have you never bothered to read? What would it cost you to read it?
- Where in your own life has your first chapter been erased — where people judged your reaction without ever asking what was done to you first? How did that feel?
- Complete this sentence, honestly: “I find it hardest to extend context to people who ______.” Sit with the answer. Don’t fix it yet. Just see it.
Salima
Just me thinking out loud over here