A World of Alienation: Mourning the Children of Empire
From the bombed skies over Iran and Palestine to the quiet despair within our own borders, a reflection on war, systemic repression, and the spiritual disconnection eroding our humanity—and a call to resist together.
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| Mourners hold a portrait of a students during a funeral ceremony for children, who lost their lives after a primary school in Iran’s Hormozgan province was targeted in US and Israeli attacks, on March 03, 2026 in Minab, Iran [Anadolu/ Agency] |
By César Omar Sánchez
Over 175 girls perished under the bombardment carried out by the United States and Israel in Iran. Their lives were extinguished in an instant. They will never grow, never dream, never see a future. Gone forever.
They will never become teachers, athletes, or scientists. Never mothers, never partners, never the women they might have been. Their laughter silenced. Their potential erased from this world, forever.
And this is the world we are living in.
Children in Palestine endure genocide. Across the Middle East and Africa, the young are swallowed by war. Here at home, we face our own battles—raids, censorship, repression. It feels at times like a nation unmoored, driven by greed, by power, by profit. But then again, we always lived in this state of repression; we always have. The difference now is that it is a full-blown Fascistic, Inverted Totalitarian system we are all currently living in. A world that has lost its moral center.
But beneath all of this violence, there is something even deeper corroding us. We live in a world of Alienation. As the physician and author Dr. Gabor Mate describes the four stages of Alienation:
Alienation is separation. It is becoming a stranger to what should be intimate, natural, and essential to our being. It is feeling disconnected from what makes us human.
First, we are alienated from Nature. We do not need a lecture to see it—we are actively destroying the very ecosystems that sustain us. We pave over forests, poison rivers, choke the skies, and call it progress. We have become strangers to the earth that birthed us.
Second, we are alienated from one another. We have less real contact, less intimacy, less trust. Our relationships are mediated by screens, shaped by suspicion, fractured by ideology. This isolation does not just wound the spirit; it manifests in the body. Physical illness rises. Anxiety and depression surge. We are lonelier than ever in a world more “connected” than ever.
Third, we are alienated from our work. So many people labor in jobs that hold no meaning, no creativity, no reflection of who they truly are. When our work does not express our humanity, it drains us, it exhausts us. It breeds anxiety, depression, and a hollow sense of purposelessness. And when meaning is stripped away, we search for substitutes. We obsess over appearances, status, possessions, and achievement. We chase validation. We consume. We accumulate. But none of it can replace genuine purpose. In fact, much of our economy thrives on this emptiness—selling products to fill a spiritual void it helped create.
And finally—most painfully—we become alienated from ourselves.
How many times have you felt something deep in your gut, a quiet but powerful inner knowing—and ignored it? How many times did you silence that voice, only to regret it later? We have been conditioned to distrust our own intuition, to override our inner compass in favor of external noise.
As I type this journal on my laptop, my hands tremble. Tears fall. I think of parents watching their children die, of homes reduced to rubble, of lives shattered for the sake of empire and profit. I think about my accountant, a father who told me about his baby son, hospitalized and struggling to breathe for days. I heard the crack in his voice as he tried to remain composed while telling me his son's story. That brief glimpse into his fear and love for his family—it pierced me. I can't even imagine the emotional trauma he and his wife endured during the whole ordeal, and of course, the cost of the hospital bill he received for the treatment and stay at this hospital, just to save his son's life. Because this system is profit over humanity, simply insane!
We are not meant to live like this—disconnected from the earth, from each other, from meaningful work, from ourselves.
We are wired for love. For compassion. For solidarity. The system we currently live in feeds the worst in us—the beast of greed and indifference—but only if we allow it to. Alienation is not our destiny. It is a condition imposed and normalized.
We must break from it. We must reclaim our humanity.
How much longer will we sit hypnotized by propaganda, by screens telling us what to think and feel? Everywhere we turn, narratives are fed to us. But we are not machines. We are not consumers first. We are human beings.
This piece is dedicated to every child who has lost their life in conflicts across the globe—especially those whose deaths have come at the hands of U.S. imperial power—children who were never given the chance to live, to dream, to become.
To them, I say: I am sorry. I am sorry for what has been done in the name of power and empire. I am sorry you had to bear the cost. I apologize to the families who had to watch their loved ones die and such a heinous act of terror from the hands of both Israel and the United States.
But an apology is not enough.
We need new ways of thinking. New courage. New forms of resistance.
We are living inside the belly of a beast—and it will not change on its own.
We have heard and read this speech before. But now it is time to act on it. Yes, I am scared like any human being, but staying silent while this continues is unacceptable, and I can't live like that.
This is the fight of our lives.
And I am in it, to my last breath. So with that, I say FUCK the EMPIRE and all lackeys, accomplices that are nothing but psychotic cheerleaders for Wars and Profit!
Let's continue the fight in solidarity against this death machine. Reaching out to anyone reading this! Let's stand together!
Venecermos!
Reference:
1. Sustainable Human. How Modern Life Can Make Us Feel Alienated. https://sustainablehuman.org/stories/how-modern-life-can-make-us-feel-alienated/. Accessed March 3, 2026.