Easter arrives differently for each of us. For some, it is the resurrection — the central miracle of faith, the promise that death does not have the final word. For others, it is simply spring: the earth returning, light reclaiming the day, the stubborn insistence of life pushing through cold ground. Whatever it means to you, Easter is fundamentally about one thing: the refusal to accept that what is broken must stay broken.
I’m writing to you in that spirit today. need to tell you about something that kept me up at night. Several nights, actually. And I think it might be worth a few of your waking hours too.
But first, let me back up.
If you’ve read anything I’ve written before, you know I circle back obsessively to one idea: the cost of dehumanization. It’s not a political position, exactly. It’s more like a wound I keep poking at because it won’t heal, because I keep seeing it reopen in new places, in new ways, every time I think we might be getting better.
Here’s what I mean. Our modern culture moves at a pace that leaves almost no room for thinking. And even less room for feeling. We scroll past a headline about human suffering and within seconds we’re looking at a recipe for banana bread. We hear words that should shock us and we barely register them because the next thing is already demanding our attention. The machinery of daily life, the algorithms, the notifications, the endless stream of content, all of it seems designed to keep us moving too fast to sit with anything uncomfortable.
And when we move that fast, something happens to us. We start to lose the capacity to see other humans as fully human. Not because we’re evil. But because seeing requires space, and we’ve given all our space away.
Words That Should Have Stopped Us
I work hard to avoid attributing problems to any particular political party. I think the forces eroding our humanity are bigger than parties, and I think the tribalism of “my team versus your team” is itself part of the disease. I’ve tried to write about systems and cultures rather than individuals, because I genuinely believe most people, regardless of their politics, want roughly the same things: safety for their families, dignity in their work, a sense of belonging.
But I’m going to be honest with you. This week I’m exhausted. And I’m struggling.
When I heard our president threaten to bomb other human beings “back to the Stone Age where they belong,” I felt something break a little. Not because I was surprised, exactly. But because of how unremarkable it seemed. How quickly the news cycle moved on. How few people I know even mentioned it.
Let me just sit with those words for a moment. “Back to the Stone Age where they belong.”
Where they belong.
This is the language of dehumanization. Not subtle, not coded, not requiring any interpretation. Just the plain assertion that some category of people belongs in rubble and ruin, that their reduction to ash is their proper place in the order of things.
I don’t care right now which party you belong to. I don’t care how you feel about foreign policy or what you think the strategic calculations require. I just want to ask: did those words land in your body at all? Did you feel anything? Or had you already scrolled past?
A Film That Made Me Cry
Here’s my real reason for writing today. I recently watched a documentary called The Alabama Solution, and it undid me.
I’m not going the whole thing for you because I want you to watch it yourself. But I’ll tell you what it did to me: it made visible a system of dehumanization that operated in plain sight, with paperwork and procedures and people just doing their jobs. It showed how ordinary cruelty becomes normalized when we stop seeing the humans on the other end of our policies.
I cried. Not performative tears, not the kind you shed at a sad movie and then shake off. The kind that come from somewhere deeper, from recognizing something you didn’t want to see.
And then I couldn’t sleep. For several nights, I kept turning the images over in my mind, kept asking myself questions I didn’t have answers to. How did this happen? How did people participate in this and go home to their families and eat dinner and watch television? How did a whole system convince itself this was acceptable?
Around the same time, I also watched a film about Nuremberg, about the architects of what the Nazis called “the final solution.” And what struck me was not the obvious monstrousness of the people on trial. What struck me was how reasonable they sounded. How they explained their decisions with the calm logic of administrators solving problems. How they had separated the humanity of their victims from the “policy challenges” they were addressing.
They were not wild-eyed fanatics, most of them. They were bureaucrats. They were people who had stopped feeling.
This Can Happen Here
I know some of you are already thinking it: “That was different. That was then. That was there. It can’t happen here.”
And I understand why you think that. I used to think that too. American exceptionalism runs deep in our bones, this sense that we are somehow protected by our founding documents or our national character from the worst impulses that have consumed other societies.
But I’ve lived abroad. I’ve seen America from the outside. And I’ve come to believe that we are not as different as we like to imagine. We are humans, like all humans, susceptible to the same fears and resentments and tribal impulses that have driven every atrocity in history.
The only thing that has ever protected any society from its worst possibilities is the collective decision to see each other as fully human. To maintain that space for thinking and feeling. To resist the acceleration that makes cruelty feel normal.
When I watch The Alabama Solution, I don’t see a foreign country or a distant era. I see patterns I recognize. Systems of categorization and control. Language that separates “us” from “them.” Ordinary people doing their jobs within structures designed to hide the human cost of their actions.
It could happen here. And the question is not whether we are better than the people who let it happen before. The question is whether we will make the space to see what’s happening now.
A Request Before the Election
I’m not going to tell you how to vote. I genuinely believe that’s not my place, and I think the impulse to tell other people what to do is part of the same disease I’m describing.
But I am going to make a request. Before you cast your next vote, for any office, at any level, I’m asking you to do something first: make some space to humanize yourself again.
Watch The Alabama Solution. Or watch the Nuremberg film. Or find some other piece of art or testimony or documentation that forces you to sit with the human cost of dehumanization.
Don’t watch it to confirm what you already believe. Don’t watch it as ammunition against the other side. Watch it as a human being trying to remember what it feels like to be fully human, trying to recover that capacity for seeing other humans as fully human too.
Then, from that place, with that weight in your chest, make your decisions.
I could be wrong about a lot of things. In my experience, I usually am wrong about something, and often about the things I feel most certain about. But I don’t think I’m wrong about this: a society that loses the ability to feel the humanity of others is a society capable of anything. And we recover that ability not through arguments or ideology but through the slow, painful work of making space to feel again.
The election will come and go. The news cycle will churn through its next outrage. But what we do with our capacity for seeing each other, that stays with us. That shapes the kind of people we become and the kind of society we build.
So please. Turn off the notifications for an evening. Sit with something difficult. Let it keep you up if it needs to. And then, from that place of recovered humanity, decide what you believe and who you want to be.
That’s all I’m asking.
I want to close where I began. Easter — in every tradition that touches it, religious or secular — is a story about what happens when we refuse to look away from suffering. The stone gets rolled back not so we can forget what happened inside the tomb, but so we can walk toward each other in the light. That’s what I’m asking of you today. Not agreement. Not a particular vote. Just the willingness to roll the stone back — to look, to feel, and to stay human while you do it.
Happy Easter. However you mark it, I hope it finds you with enough stillness to feel something true.
If these themes resonate with you, I’ve explored the cost of dehumanization and the path If this resonated with you, I think you’ll find my forthcoming book, Room to Be Human, genuinely useful. Follow along here and keep an eye out for it later this year. In the meantime, my previous book, Better Places, traces my own journey — from a resentment-driven scarcity thinker to someone learning to harvest abundance and compassion instead.
