exigencelost
Someday a child will learn about this year and ask “but if there was an epidemic killing people, and crowded spaces made it spread faster, why didn’t they open the prisons and let the people inside go home? why would they leave people in there to die?” and their teacher or parent will feel the way we do, when a child asks how slavery or the Holocaust was allowed to happen: unable to explain in any way that makes sense, and trapped in the knowledge that history cannot forgive us
This is not normal. Mass captivity is not normal. A structure premised on the assumption maintaining that captivity is more important than anything, more important than preserving life, is not normal. Writing people off in the millions is not normal. We’ve made it normal. We’ve suspended the basic human impulse for community and decency, but that suspension won’t last forever. The prison won’t exist forever, and when it’s gone, our grandchildren will not be able to understand how we could do this.
