Decay

How did we get here—this place where killing masquerades as an answer to dislike? Where pulling a trigger, on a screen or in the street, feels easier than meeting another person’s eyes and risking recognition of their fragile humanity?

Polarization is not the disease. It is the fever, the rash, the visible symptom of something deeper: dehumanization.

And it creeps everywhere. In the blinking crosshairs of shooter games. In drone footage where human lives dissolve into coordinates. In classrooms where literature is dissected like a cadaver, the pulse long gone. In galleries where paintings are priced before they are felt. Even the humanities—those meant to keep us human—have learned to drain the blood from experience.

Most telling of all is our language.

Once, war trauma was shell shock—two syllables sharp as shrapnel. Later it softened to battle fatigue, as though devastation could be cured by rest. Now it hides in the smooth, clinical folds of an acronym: PTSD. Four letters, bloodless as a chart note.

This is how dehumanization works: it files the edges off pain until we stop flinching. Once horror is easy to name, it becomes easy to ignore.

The cost is polarization. If words can sterilize trauma, they can also reduce neighbors to obstacles, enemies, ghosts. Online, we speak to avatars, never hearing their laughter or grief. And it is always easier to hurl stones at a shadow.

Polarization is the wildfire. Dehumanization is the spark.

But fire can be resisted. We can rehumanize. By choosing words that wound us awake instead of lull us numb. By telling stories that ache, bleed, refuse to let us forget the fragile miracle of being alive together. By seeing opponents not as categories, but as maddening, luminous, flawed people who carry the same hunger for meaning in their bones.

Because when we stop seeing each other as human, we rehearse for killing.

And if humanity becomes only a ghost, what will remain to haunt us but ourselves?