The year 2025 should have scared me, but I have become so desensitized to the catastrophe that I already recognize it as part of the landscape. Another year which should have been frightening for Gazans and for these children who learned the buzz of a drone earlier than the sound of a song or the twenty-year-old Russians and Ukrainians condemned to commit suicide, we don’t know why; I should fear that in Europe we will start talking about rearmament with the same ease with which we previously talked about Erasmus+; Another year when I should fear that the vocabulary of war has become so thin that it no longer weighs on the language. I should be terrified of the weather; not its collapse, because that would even be honest, but this thing in installments where the summer lasts longer and longer and the water runs out a little sooner and the fires die out a little closer. The apocalypse of comfortable monthly payments
I could continue to list the disasters, but that’s not the problem. The end of the world has ceased to be an event and has become something that always happens to others and happens all the time; to other children, to other young people, to other families; to other people. We have trained ourselves to look without looking, to assume that horror has a specific geography and that, as long as it doesn’t get too close to us, we can move forward. The apocalypse is no longer scary because it almost always falls on people we don’t know, in places we pronounce incorrectly, and that makes it bearable. Fear is redistributed and displaced. We have been socialized around the idea that the world can end several times a day as long as it is not ours, as long as it does not affect those we love, as long as we can continue to sit at the table with the feeling – precarious, but sufficient – that, for now, we are still safe. The end of the world is other people.
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