Loving Rage
A girl on a gurney, and a world on fire.
There’s a little girl I think about almost every day.
I’ve never met her. I don’t know her name. I watched a video of her a few months ago, lying on a gurney in what remained of a hospital somewhere in Gaza, and I haven’t been able to put it down since. She was turning her head back and forth, back and forth, in this rhythmic motion that told me her mind had gone somewhere else. Somewhere it could survive what was happening to her body. Her mother stood beside her, frozen in that particular stillness of a person for whom every possible action has become impossible. Not reaching for her daughter. Not stepping back. Just standing there while her child’s head moved left, then right, then left again.
When the camera pulled back, I understood.
Both of her legs were gone. Blasted off at the thigh. And she must have been in such total, obliterating pain that her brain had simply... left. Gone to wherever it is that consciousness retreats when the body becomes unbearable.
I don’t know if she’s still alive. I’d be surprised if she is.
But I carry her now. That rhythmic turning. The stillness of her mother. The absence where her legs should have been. She lives in my mind like a photograph I never asked for. I see her when I wake up. I see her when I look at my own children. I see her when I scroll past another headline about “the conflict” and feel my chest tighten with something I can’t metabolise into anything manageable.
And I find myself thinking about her more, not less, as everything falls apart.
I watch Netanyahu - the actual architect of her suffering, the man who gave the orders that took her legs - get appointed to a “peace board” for Gaza. I watch billionaires and real estate developers carve up the rubble like a carcass, planning resorts on land that still holds bodies. I watch concentration camps built in plain sight. I watch a president deploy his own federal forces against his own citizens, shooting people in the street, treating Minneapolis like occupied territory, and I think: this is what impunity looks like when it stops pretending.
The masks are off. All of them. The mask of Western democracy. The mask of international law. The mask of human rights as anything other than a weapon wielded by the powerful against the weak. We’re watching the whole rotten architecture reveal itself, and it turns out there was nothing underneath but force and money and the willingness to use both without limit.
And I think about her. Head turning. Legs gone. Mother frozen.
But I also watch other things.
I watch Iranians rise against their government, knowing what it will cost. And it’s costing them everything. The regime has killed tens of thousands of protesters in the streets - shot them with live ammunition, massacred them in numbers we may never fully count. And when the world started paying attention, when the videos started leaking out, the government did what authoritarian governments do: they turned off the internet. They plunged the entire country into digital darkness, so they could kill their own people without witnesses.
They’re confiscating satellite dishes door to door. Seizing private security footage. Cutting phone lines. Doing everything they can to make sure the outside world can’t see the bodies in the streets.
And still, the Iranians rise. They know they might die. They’ve watched their neighbours die. They’ve buried their friends. And they rise anyway, because some things are worse than dying, and living under that regime is one of them.
And I think about her.
I watch young people in Nepal hoist the flag of the Straw Hat Pirates and burn their parliament to the ground.
If you don’t know One Piece, you should. It’s a manga - a Japanese comic that became an anime, that became the best-selling comic series in history - about a band of misfits who refuse to accept that the world’s cruelty is inevitable. The story follows Monkey D. Luffy and his crew as they sail across the seas, challenging a corrupt World Government that controls nations through force, propaganda, and the suppression of history itself. The government in One Piece rewrites the past, erases inconvenient truths, brands anyone who resists as criminals deserving death. Sound familiar?
The Straw Hats fight it anyway. They free slaves. They topple tyrants. They look at systems that have held power for centuries and say: no, not this, this isn’t how the world has to be. They lose friends. They get broken. They keep going.
A Nepali protester told a reporter: “The Straw Hat pirates symbolise freedom, liberty - the spirit that you have to oppose the unjust authority. That really inspired me.” A Madagascan protester said: “In the story of One Piece there is injustice, there is corruption, the government is thinking themselves to be untouchable, but it can be touched by the power of the people.”
The Indonesian government called the flag treason. They tore down murals. Amnesty International had to issue a statement defending protesters’ right to fly a cartoon pirate banner.
That’s how scared they are. Of a flag. Of what it means when young people look at fictional pirates fighting a fictional corrupt government and see their own lives reflected back.
And I think about her.
I watch Minnesotans organise the largest general strike in nearly a hundred years - since the Teamsters shut down Minneapolis in 1934. Over 700 businesses closed. Solidarity actions spread to 300 cities across the country. And this isn’t just people staying home from work. This is neighbours showing up for each other in ways that make me want to weep.
Teachers are loading minivans at sunset in minus 22 degrees, delivering groceries and medicine and diapers to immigrant families too terrified to leave their homes. Parents are forming human rings around elementary schools during drop-off, watching for ICE, ready to blow whistles the moment they spot agents. The whistle has become a symbol - simple, powerful, passed hand to hand. Awareness, protection, protest.
The Somali community - people who fled civil war, who rebuilt their lives in Minnesota, who are overwhelmingly American citizens - is running foot patrols through Cedar-Riverside in neon orange vests and beanies that say “FUCK ICE.” Kamal Yusuf doesn’t speak English, but he walks the neighbourhood from 8am to 6pm in the biting cold, whistling for minutes without pause the moment he spots federal agents, posting to Signal groups with hundreds of volunteers. At the West Bank Diner, they’re giving free tea and sambusas to anyone on patrol.
When Renée Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent, elderly Somali women showed up at the protest with foil trays of homemade sambusas to share with their neighbours. “Renée died for us,” said the vice president of the Minneapolis City Council. “She died protecting us.”
Churches have mobilised over a thousand people through WhatsApp to form neighbourhood watch networks. A science teacher said: “When I first started teaching, we had fire drills and tornado drills. Then we started to have to develop safety drills in case of an active shooter. Now, we have to develop safety protocols in case our own government shows up to hurt or kidnap our students?”
Volunteers are taking out the garbage for families in hiding. They’re dropping off schoolwork for kids who can’t leave. They’re tracking ICE vehicles through decentralised networks, following agents around city blocks. One observer followed an agent around a single block twenty-five times. They’re returning impounded cars to the families of the detained, for free. They’re raising rent money for households that can’t work. They’re feeding each other. They’re protecting each other. They’re refusing to let their neighbours be taken.
“It could be toilet paper, deodorant, cleaning supplies,” one teacher said, loading her minivan. “People are out here, community is out here.”
A 24-year-old named Yubi Hassan handed out hot tea to protesters in the freezing cold. His friend held a sign that said “Free Somali Tea.” “We realised it’s negative 20 degrees out today,” Hassan said, “and anybody would appreciate something warm.”
This is what it looks like when people refuse. Not just marching. Not just shouting. Feeding each other. Protecting each other. You cannot have our community. Our spaces. Our friends. Our neighbours. Our complicity. Our silence.
And I think about her.
They need you numb. That’s the whole game.
The feeds, the endless scroll, the algorithmic both-sidesing, the sheer volume of horror delivered to your pocket every hour of every day - it’s not an accident. It’s a system. And the system exists to sand you down until you can watch a child lose her legs and feel nothing but a tired sadness that passes by the next refresh.
Dissociation breeds dehumanisation. That’s how the circle of acceptable suffering expands. First you’re overwhelmed. Then you’re exhausted. Then you’re numb. And then you’re complicit, because complicity is just what numbness looks like when you’re standing still while the world burns.
So fuck the numbness. Fuck the managed grief. Fuck the thoughts and prayers and the carefully calibrated concern that lets you feel like you’ve done something while doing nothing at all.
If you still feel rage when you see that little girl’s face - if your chest still tightens and your throat still closes and something in you still screams this is wrong, this is an abomination, this cannot stand - then you haven’t been captured yet. The dissociation hasn’t completed its work. You can still see a child as a child rather than content.
That rage is not a flaw. It’s the thing that keeps you human.
We’re taught that anger is destructive. That it clouds judgement, burns bridges, makes us ugly. We’re told to manage it, contain it, transform it into something more palatable. Breathe through it. Don’t let it consume you.
But rage is also clarity. It’s the part of you that refuses to accept the unacceptable. It’s the signal that says this is wrong when everything around you is pretending it’s fine. Without it, we absorb. We adapt. We adjust our expectations downward until atrocity becomes normal and normal becomes tolerable and tolerable becomes invisible.
The rage keeps you from crossing that line. It keeps her face in front of you.
But it can do more than keep you awake. Look at Minnesota. Look at Iran. Look at Nepal. Look at what their anger built.
Sambusas in the snow. Anime flags on burning parliament gates. Neighbours who’ve never met forming human chains around schools. People rising in the streets knowing they might die, and rising anyway, together. The rage brought them closer, not further apart. It made them more tender with each other, not less.
That’s rage too. Rage that connects instead of divides. Rage that feeds instead of starves. Rage that looks like love, because sometimes it is love - love made ferocious by threat.
Soraya Chemaly wrote that anger is “an assertion of rights and worth. It is communication, equality, and knowledge. It is intimacy, acceptance, fearlessness, embodiment, revolt, and reconciliation. It is freedom, independence, expansiveness, and entitlement. It is justice, passion, clarity, and motivation.”
Read that list again. Intimacy. Acceptance. Reconciliation. This is not the anger they warn you about. This is rage made beautiful. Rage that builds the world you’re fighting for even as you fight.
She was writing about women’s anger - about the ways we’re taught to suppress it, apologise for it, transform it into something more palatable. But her words belong to all of us now. To everyone watching the world come apart and feeling that hot, unmanageable thing rising in their chest. To everyone told that their anger is unproductive, unreasonable, too much.
It’s not too much. The situation is too much. Your anger is the correct response.
But don’t let it harden you. Let it open you. Let it connect you to everyone else who feels it too. Let it be the thing that makes you show up for your neighbours, wherever your neighbours are.
Rage is not what gets in our way. It is our way.
I don’t know if the uprisings will win.
I watch the Iranians dying in their tens of thousands, their government killing them in the dark behind a wall of digital silence, and I don’t know if they’ll succeed. I watch the Nepalis with their anime flags and their burned parliament and I don’t know if what comes next will be better or just a different configuration of the same. I watch the Minnesotans holding their communities together in minus 20 degrees, and I don’t know if it will be enough against the machinery arrayed against them.
The power is so concentrated now. The impunity so total. Men who bomb hospitals get appointed to rebuild them. Men who cage children get reelected by millions. The structures that were supposed to protect the vulnerable have revealed themselves as structures designed to protect the powerful, and the powerful have stopped pretending otherwise.
Mark Carney stood at Davos last week and said what politicians almost never say: “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” The old order is not coming back. The rules-based international system, the institutions we built our assumptions on - the WTO, the UN, the frameworks of collective problem-solving - they’re not evolving. They’re collapsing. “Nostalgia is not a strategy,” he said. The comforting fictions are over. What’s left is “the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality.”
And I keep thinking about that line Martin Luther King Jr. made famous during the Civil Rights Movement: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
A lot of us took comfort in that. We told ourselves that progress might be slow, might be painful, but that time was on our side. That eventually, inevitably, we’d get there.
But we forgot what King actually meant. He wasn’t promising that justice arrives on its own. He was saying the arc bends because people bend it. Because people bleed for it. Because people die for it. The quote was never meant as comfort. It was a call to arms.
The arc will not save you. It will not save that little girl on the gurney. It will not save any of us. If we want justice, we have to fight for it with everything we have, and even then we might lose.
So I can’t promise you hope. I can’t tell you this story ends well. History doesn’t bend on its own. It breaks, and then it gets remade by whoever shows up to drag it somewhere new.
The uprisings may not win. But winning isn’t the point. Refusing is the point. Looking at the full weight of what’s arrayed against you and saying no. Not this. Not us. You cannot have this.
Refusal doesn’t guarantee victory. But it guarantees you didn’t consent.
And in a world where impunity has become the default setting, where atrocity has become policy, where a little girl’s legs can be blasted off and the men who ordered it get appointed to decide her future - refusing to consent is the first act. Everything else follows from there.
I don’t know how to end this except to say: let the rage stay.
Don’t manage it. Don’t meditate it away. Don’t let anyone tell you that anger is unproductive or too much. It is too much. The situation is too much. The appropriate response to watching children get shredded while the world debates proportionality is rage. The appropriate response to watching tens of thousands of Iranians get massacred behind a digital blackout while the world does nothing is rage. The appropriate response to all of this - the camps, the bombs, the bullets, the absolute shameless impunity of it all - is rage.
But let it be the kind of rage that builds. The kind that makes you show up at your neighbour’s door with groceries. The kind that makes you stand in the freezing cold with a whistle. The kind that passes sambusas hand to hand. The kind that says: these are my people, and you cannot have them.
Because these children are all our children. That’s what we forgot. That’s what decades of borders and algorithms and manufactured distance trained us to forget - that a little girl on a gurney in Gaza is not someone else’s tragedy. She’s mine. She’s yours. She’s ours. Every child broken by this machinery belongs to all of us, and we failed her, and we are still failing, and the only way to stop failing is to refuse.
I think about her every day. I don’t know her name. I don’t know if she survived.
But I know what I owe her.
What I owe her is to refuse to look away. To let her face stay in front of me. To refuse to compartmentalise her into something I can live with comfortably. To let the image stay jagged. To let it cut. To let it drive me toward whatever action I can take, however small, however insufficient.
And to let the rage be beautiful. To let it connect me to everyone else who carries her face. To let it build the world where no child lies on a gurney like that, even as we fight the world that put her there.
The rage is not the problem.
The rage is the answer.
Your writing is inspiring. I also am a quite reader hiding in the shadows but felt it was important to let you know the way you think is poetic to read and I am grateful you share your thoughts so eloquently.
The rage is the answer.