When a bomb falls on a school, a hospital, or a home, no euphemism can soften the truth. Babies die in incubators. Teenage girls die in classrooms. Civilians experience violence not as a “military operation” or a “strike,” but as death delivered with impunity. Yet political leaders and military strategists insist on language that sanitizes catastrophe, as if calling mass killing an “operation” could contain the human cost.
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Are you aware the Senate has not ratified the 1977 protocols of the Geneva Conventions that prohibit attacks on civilians?
In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after thousands of years of violent international conflict, efforts to establish global norms for nations in connection with war, diplomacy, economic relations, and human rights accelerated. These efforts resulted in the founding of the United Nations (which develops, codifies, and enforces international law), the International Court of Justice (which settles legal disputes among nations and provides advisory opinions on legal questions), and the International Criminal Court (which investigates and tries individuals charged with the gravest crimes of concern to the international community).
As the invasion of Iran grinds on and its boundaries expand, the House and Senate have rejected resolutions that would bring the savagery to a halt. I have to ask: What will it take to finally break the back of the Trump regime’s war madness?
There’s a special place in hell for those who abuse power Sent from my iPhone
There are moments in history when a nation must decide whether regime change begins at the ballot box—or at the barrel of a gun.
By afternoon, familiar responses were already in motion: statements of condolence, crisis teams deployed, reminders that the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7. All of it mattered. None of it was enough.
Dr. Saeid Golkar, at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, reported Feb. 11, 2025 that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi “reaffirmed Iran’s commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and cited a religious decree, known as a fatwa, by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which bans weapons of mass destruction as evidence of Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.”
Understanding his deep emotional wounds is not an act of sympathy. It is an act of clarity. Harmful men are not born fully formed. They are made—by families, by culture, and by expectations that teach boys early that vulnerability equals weakness. Trump’s niece, the psychologist Mary L. Trump, has described his childhood as shaped by emotional deprivation and a father who prized winning above empathy. In that home life, where affection was conditional, and tenderness too risky, survival depended on projecting invulnerability at all costs. Trump learned early to practice the art of the no feel.
In the early afternoon of April 17, 2025, I received what to date has been the worst message ever sent to me. It was my daughter, a senior at Florida State University, texting that she was running from campus because there was an active shooter nearby. My husband and I immediately turned on the news to learn that the police were on the scene and that some students were staying in classrooms or hiding while others were fleeing.