I didn’t sleep well last night, and while part of that was physical as I gave blood last night, that wasn’t really what kept me awake. I kept reaching for my phone, knowing I shouldn’t, watching the same pattern unfold over and over again. Escalation. Language that didn’t sit right. A sense that things were moving faster than anyone was willing to acknowledge. And then this morning, The U.S. Presidents statement that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” It’s not a phrase we should hear and move past. It’s not a word we should use lightly, yet it was delivered as if it were just another statement in a long list.
Most of us learned what civilization meant early on. The cradle of civilization. Mesopotamia, part of which includes modern day Iran. It was the beginning of organized society, of agriculture, of law, of writing, of systems that still shape how we live today. That place is not abstract. It is real, and it is part of what we are now watching being discussed as if it can simply be erased or sacrificed in pursuit of something that is never fully explained. What unsettles me most is how easily we discuss other societies as less than. We talk about the Iranian civilization, sometimes without even realizing that underneath it sits an assumption that they are somehow less civilized and we are more so. That we are the rational ones, the stable ones, the ones who define what “civil” even means. I can’t get out of my head and heart that destroying the ‘cradle of civilization’ may ultimately bring about the fall of all civilization.
But there is nothing in what I heard today that is remotely civil. Talking casually about striking bridges, power plants, and infrastructure that sustains daily life, brushing off questions about legality and morality, and framing destruction as strategy is not civility. Suggesting that people living under bombardment are asking for more of it is not just uncivil, it is a complete abandonment of reality. If we are going to use that word honestly, then we need to be just as honest about what we are watching. We also need to stop pretending that military and civilian infrastructure can be neatly separated, as though there is a clean line between what is strategic and what is human. There isn’t, and we know that from our own lives. In Alberta, roads that lead to Cold Lake are also the roads people use every day. Power that supports the base at Trenton also supports entire communities. Water systems sustain everyone. In parts of the world where water itself is manufactured through desalination, infrastructure is not a convenience; it is survival, and there is no separating those things when they are targeted.
All of this comes on the heels of something that should have held our attention for very different reasons. A dangerous and complex rescue mission brought people home. That required discipline, training, and courage, and it deserved to stand on its own. But it didn’t hold, because it was immediately overtaken by something louder and more inflated that needed to escalate beyond it. That is the pattern that is becoming impossible to ignore. If escalation is what is rewarded, then it does not stop with one country or one moment. It expands. It looks for the next stage, the next justification, the next target.
And that is where this stops being about somewhere else. Where does that leave Canada? Where does that leave our allies? Where does that leave a system that depends on some shared understanding of restraint and of limits? If those limits no longer matter, then we are not just watching a conflict unfold at a distance. We are watching the erosion of something much closer to home. I don’t know what happens tonight, but I do know that when the destruction of the systems that sustain human life is spoken about as strategy or inevitability, something has already shifted. Civilization is something we either uphold in our actions and our words, or we don’t.
Nancy's Notes 