Rubble, Rockets, and a Christmas Tree

Dear Diary, today is November 24, 2025. It has been a long day for us.

This morning, in Gaza City, some of us walked through streets that used to be neighborhoods and are now broken teeth of concrete and rebar. Palestinian women stepped over piles of rubble, past hollowed-out buildings, the air cloudy with dust and memory. We are tired there—tired of sirens, of counting losses instead of birthdays.

Far away, in Peshawar, Pakistan, another part of us heard an explosion outside the Federal Constabulary headquarters. A suicide bomber blew himself up at the gate; two more men tried to storm in and opened fire before they were killed. Three of us died, and eleven of us were wounded in the chaos and gunfire. While sirens screamed in Peshawar, some of us in Cotabato, in the Philippines, were also fighting—MILF factions turning their weapons on each other in a clan feud that left seven militants dead.

In Kwamouth, in western DR Congo, rival militias clashed again. At least fourteen of us did not go home tonight. Our conflicts circle the same themes: land, power, fear, old hurts that never really healed.

We were careless, too, in quieter ways. In Tamil Nadu, India, two private buses crashed head-on in Tenkasi district, killing seven and injuring more than thirty of us. In Uttarakhand, a bus full of pilgrims overturned and plunged into a gorge in Tehri Garhwal, killing five and injuring thirteen. It is strange how often we turn journeys meant to bring us closer to the divine into scenes of twisted metal and roadside prayers.

In Tokyo, one of us stole a car and rammed it into pedestrians, killing one and injuring ten before being arrested. We invent miraculous machines, then use them to wound each other.

In Tehran, we gathered around flag-draped coffins—the remains of unknown soldiers from the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq war, found decades later and carried through the streets. Mothers who long ago stopped expecting closure still cried like the war had ended yesterday. We have such a long memory for pain, and yet we keep making more of it.

In Sri Lanka, a court in Embilipitiya sentenced ten of us—three of them women—to death for a murder committed in 2011, even though the country has not carried out an execution since 1976. We write the word justice in capital letters, but it still feels like a question mark.

In Brazil, judges of the Supreme Federal Court decided that former president Jair Bolsonaro will remain in police custody as he appeals a twenty-seven-year prison sentence for allegedly plotting a coup and tampering with his ankle monitor. Part of us is relieved that a democracy is trying to hold itself together; part of us wonders how close we came to watching another country slip.

Across the ocean, the United States wrote new lines in its ledgers. Today, it announced that Temporary Protected Status will end for roughly four thousand Myanmar nationals in January 2026, saying the political and security situation there has changed ahead of elections. For those of us who built lives around that protection, changed does not feel like enough of a word.

On the same page of the register, the United States labeled Venezuela’s Cartel of the Suns—an umbrella name for military and security officials accused of large-scale cocaine trafficking—as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Another sanction, another acronym, another attempt to control a trade we keep fueling with our own demand.

In Egypt, we went back to the polls for the second round of parliamentary elections after votes in nineteen of seventy constituencies were annulled for violations. Ballot papers, fingers inked, observers watching closely. We are still trying to remember how to choose our leaders without fear.

In Belgium, our workers pushed back. Trade unions launched a three-day general strike across the country, protesting what they call the government’s social dismantling through budget cuts. Trains, schools, and services slowed or stopped as we tried to say, together, this is too much.

Not all of today’s movements were about loss and protest. In Israel and India, we quietly rearranged our families. The Israeli government approved a plan with New Delhi to bring 5,800 members of the Bnei Menashe—an India-based community that traces its heritage to the lost tribes of Israel—to settle in the Galilee under Aliyah laws. For some of us, this day will be remembered as the moment the dream of a distant homeland started to become a plane ticket.

Up in orbit, we kept looking outward. From China came the announcement that Shenzhou-22, an unmanned spacecraft, will launch to restore normal operations on the Tiangong space station after a damaged craft disrupted the schedule. Even when our politics tangle on the ground, we still share the same thin shell of atmosphere and the same curiosity about what is beyond it.

Back on Earth, in New York City, we put on tuxedos and gowns for the 53rd International Emmy Awards, honoring television created outside the United States. At the New York Hilton Midtown, hosted by Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos, we celebrated stories we told each other in dozens of languages this year. Some of those stories were about people like the ones in Gaza, Peshawar, and Kwamouth; some were about dragons, detectives, and dreams—but all of them were us, trying to understand ourselves.

In Washington, one of us—First Lady Melania Trump—stepped out onto the North Portico of the White House in high heels to receive the official 2025 White House Christmas tree, a white fir from Michigan, rolling in on a horse-drawn wagon. While parts of us grieved and protested, other parts of us began hanging lights and planning holidays.

In Berlin, we turned on the bulbs at the Gendarmenmarkt Christmas market, the stalls glowing under the early darkness. In Jammu, India, one of us walked through cold fog near the India–Pakistan border, carrying fodder on their back. In Kuala Lumpur, another waded through floodwater as heavy rain turned streets into shallow rivers. The weather keeps talking to us in a language of extremes; we are still pretending we do not fully understand it.

Across the United States, cameras documented our immigration crackdown: officers in Tampa and Chicago, raids in neighborhoods, deportation flights, and a wrongly deported migrant returning to check in at an office in Baltimore. Some of us stand with clipboards and badges; some of us stand with packed suitcases; some of us stand in the street with signs.

We also gathered to celebrate our progress. At the Global Women’s Summit 2025 in Washington, women leaders—from a ballerina to entrepreneurs to an astronaut speaking from the International Space Station—shared stories about ambition, equity, and the stubbornness required to keep pushing doors open. We are slowly learning to listen to voices we once ignored.

So that was today, Diary. We have been busy, as always.

We killed each other and saved each other. We voted, struck, prayed, watched television, and hung a Christmas tree. We buried unknown soldiers from an old war and prepared rockets for future missions. We walked through rubble and into markets lit with fairy lights.

Sometimes it feels like we are a single mind with a personality disorder—violent, tender, forgetful, brilliant, petty, generous—acting out all our contradictions at once. But we are still writing, still revising. Days like November 24, 2025, will be the footnotes future generations scan to decide what kind of species we really were.

Tonight, as some of us queue for buses in Cairo, some of us rehearse acceptance speeches in New York, some of us stand guard in Peshawar, and some of us tuck children into bed under new roofs in Galilee, we are all, somehow, the same we.

We are not done yet. — Humanity