Nancy's Notes

Sometimes it feels as though the compass we once trusted to guide the world has cracked. The needle still moves, but fewer and fewer people seem certain where true north is anymore.

There are days when I sit down to write and I know exactly where the words are going. The argument is clear, the facts are lined up, and the path from beginning to end is fairly easy to see. Today is not one of those days.

This morning I watched part of a press conference from yesterday. A reporter asked what victory would look like in a war now unfolding on the other side of the world. The answer was that victory would be determined later, by the Commander in Chief, once certain goals were realized. There was a lot of room inside that answer.

And that is where something inside me began to feel very heavy.

I want to be careful here, because I know many people in this world are living through the unimaginable reality of war itself. Bombs falling and families displaced. Children growing up with the sound of sirens and explosions as the soundtrack of their lives. That is not my life, and I would never pretend otherwise.

But I also know that even those of us watching from a distance are feeling something we don’t always have language for.

Years ago, during my time serving as a school trustee, I was introduced more deeply to research around trauma. I had studied the basic elements of psychology like many people do, but this was something different. These conversations were about children, families, communities, and the lived realities people carry with them and how those realities shape the way people move through the world.

What struck me most was learning that trauma does not only live in memory. It can imprint itself into the way our bodies process stress and the way our brains respond to threat. Researchers studying survivors of war, famine, and genocide have even found evidence that severe trauma can leave biological traces in how future generations respond to stress.

The term often used is intergenerational trauma. It does not mean suffering is genetically prewritten for the next generation. But it does mean that the experiences of one generation can shape the emotional landscape of the next. I remember thinking about veterans in my own family when I first heard that research. About how people who had seen things no one should see carried those experiences quietly through the rest of their lives. Not always spoken, but always present.

And lately I have begun to wonder about something else. What happens when the entire world begins living under a cloud of constant crisis? Not the trauma of war itself, but the relentless exposure to it. The images and the arguments. The certainty in voices explaining why violence is necessary, inevitable, or even righteous.

For most of my life, the world many of us in North America lived in had a certain sense of stability. Conflicts existed, of course. Horrific ones. But there was still a broad belief that international systems, diplomacy, and cooperation were meant to prevent the worst outcomes. Lately that sense feels like it is slipping. And what replaces it is something much harder to absorb.

Certainty. Certainty from leaders about wars whose outcomes no one can truly predict. Certainty from commentators explaining who is right and who is wrong. Certainty from people interpreting modern conflict through the language of prophecy and end times.

I have even heard more people casually referencing concepts like Armageddon or the arrival of the Antichrist, as if global conflict is simply the unfolding of a predetermined script.

What many people may not realize is that much of that language is not actually biblical in the way it is often presented. The modern concept of a rapture, for example, comes largely from nineteenth century evangelical theology rather than from a clearly defined passage of scripture. Even the word antichrist in the Bible refers to many false teachers, not a single apocalyptic world leader. In other words, a great deal of what people speak about with absolute confidence is interpretation layered on top of ancient texts.

And when those interpretations are used to frame real human suffering, something inside me recoils. Because behind every geopolitical argument, every press conference, and every televised debate, there are human beings living the consequences.

Children and families. Entire generations who will grow up carrying memories that shape the rest of their lives.

That is the part that weighs on me. Not just the wars themselves, but the way our collective psyche absorbs them. If trauma can imprint itself within individuals and families, what does it mean when entire societies spend years absorbing a steady diet of fear, anger, and moral certainty about violence? What does that do to us?

What does it do to the generation growing up right now, watching the world fracture in real time through the screens in their hands?

I do not have the answers to those questions. But I do know this. Somewhere in the middle of all the noise, the rhetoric, and the declarations of victory yet to be defined, there has to remain space for something quieter. Reflection. Humility. And the recognition that human suffering should never become so normalized that we stop feeling the weight of it.

Because if the day ever comes when we can watch the suffering of others without that weight settling somewhere inside us, that will be the day we have lost something far more important than any war could ever claim. It will mean that somewhere along the way our compass quietly cracked, and we stopped noticing that the needle was no longer pointing toward our shared humanity. And I am not prepared to accept that as the price of living in this moment.