The Water We’re In
It’s ICE cold and I’m afraid of drowning
The world feels dark to me. Tragedy is not new, but we have lost the habit of seeing people as people first.
I keep wondering why we ask whether fear or force was justified instead of whether a life was sacred. Why we let power explain itself instead of asking who was harmed. Why we are so quick to call something order when what it really is, is injustice.
That is the water we are standing in right now, and it is over our heads. God help us, because we seem determined to drown in it.
This week, this little heathen read the baptism story, and what struck me was not God so much as belovedness. Someone is named worthy before they’ve proven anything. Before obedience. Before performance. Before compliance.
To say it plainly, a person’s worth is not conditional.
I used to teach some students with some major behavioral challenges, kids carrying chaos from home into my classroom. (They graduated!) But I never once wondered whether their value depended on how easy they were to manage. Their dignity was not something they had to earn.
I have never needed paperwork, perfection, or loyalty to recognize another human being as deserving of safety, care, and belonging. A society that needs justification before it offers compassion or grief no longer honors human life.
This is why so much of what we are witnessing feels morally hollow. When an agency’s first instinct is to justify deadly force and a government’s first move is to defend power instead of acknowledging harm, because the goal is “security” or “order,” it is asking us to believe that the end justifies the means.
Please revisit history lessons. History was merciless about this. Once a society accepts the logic of the current administration, its list of people who can be sacrificed only grows.
You don’t have to be smart to see the parallels and patterns. You don’t even have to be religious to recognize how spiritually bankrupt this way of governing is.
I want change, but not in this way. Not when it causes more harm physical harm and mental anguish. Not because I think we can live without laws or borders or safety, but because nothing anyone could gain means anything if we stop treating human beings as human first.
Belovedness before behavior is not naïve. But to go about it any other way doesn’t lead to order. It’s cruelty cloaked in the language of necessity. And I’m urgently asking you to resist.
Hello, I’m Sarah Scull. I’m a former journalist, and a proud member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative.
If you want to know what Iowa actually sounds like right now, follow the weekly roundups from the Iowa Writers Collaborative. We do what newspapers rarely can anymore: move easily from politics to poetry, from sports to sharp human stories, capturing the full, complicated life of the state in one thoughtful sweep. It’s Iowa, reported and reflected by people who live here and pay attention.
And something that’s super close to my heart and could use your support:
Very profound and moving, Sarah.
This was so well written, summing up my heartbreak, fear and sadness.