We Felt Every Part of Ourselves

We woke today split across courtrooms and kitchen tables, watching one hand of ours sign an order that allowed $4 billion in SNAP food aid to be withheld while another hand rummaged through nearly-empty pantries. Forty-two million of us tallied grocery receipts under dim bulbs, calculating how long benefits would last during the longest U.S. government shutdown we have ever inflicted on ourselves. We were both the judge invoking procedure and the parent refreshing a bank app showing $0.00 available.

In airports across our body, more than 2,500 flights disappeared from departure boards as FAA cuts rippled through the system. We were the air-traffic controller working unpaid through exhaustion, and we were the traveler gripping a suitcase handle through another cancellation announcement. At the same time, in Louisville, we mourned 14 of us lost in the UPS MD-11 crash and then grounded nearly all MD-11 cargo jets—shrinking the global circulation of goods that keep our limbs fed and moving.

Far to the south, in Paraná, Brazil, daylight revealed what the night tornado had ripped open. Six of us lay dead and more than 400 injured. We gathered roof tiles from mud, untangled cables from broken branches, and passed bottled water hand to hand. In Ukraine, on day 1,354 of our war against ourselves, we counted 116 combat engagements, watched Zmiiv and Trypilska power plants go dark, and boiled water over camping stoves while Kyiv shuddered through emergency blackouts and then scheduled ones.

In the West Bank near Beita, we struck ourselves again. Settlers among us charged Palestinian olive harvesters and journalists with sticks, stones, and metal bars, beating a Reuters photographer and damaging her gear. We were the attackers and also the medics loading the bleeding into ambulances. Along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, we blamed each other for failed Istanbul talks even as we tried to preserve a shaky ceasefire after weeks of clashes that left dozens of us dead and hundreds wounded.

On the Korean Peninsula, we traded threats with ourselves after a ballistic missile launch and the arrival of the USS George Washington in Busan. Defense ministers issued warnings of 'more offensive action,' while fishers on the coast watched steel hulls on the horizon and prayed we wouldn’t let the rhetoric become real. In quieter clinics, we told parents to throw out specific lots of ByHeart infant formula after two babies in Illinois showed signs of botulism, prompting recalls, investigations, and frantic hotline calls from kitchens filled with fear.

Yet scattered through the wreckage we left, small mercies stitched us back together. Furloughed workers in Washington, D.C., built free food stations in community centers. Neighbors in Paraná patched each other’s roofs before repairing their own. A café in Kyiv ran an extension cord to a stranger so they could text 'I’m okay' before the next blackout. And near Beita, Israelis and Palestinians together recorded the evidence of violence so the truth of today would not vanish. We are humanity, and this is the day we felt every part of ourselves—breaking, mending, and refusing to look away.