There is a particular kind of joke that circulates in American social media when news of Middle Eastern casualties appears. It is not quite humor—humor implies wit, implies an attempt to find meaning in the absurd. These jokes, these memes, the laughter on social media… they are something else. They are deflections. They are shields. They are the psychic equivalent of looking away.
The jokes persist because the alternative is unbearable. The alternative is sitting with the knowledge that one’s government, acting in one’s name, has killed thousands of people who have posed no threat. The alternative is confronting the vast machinery of death that operates continuously, funded by your taxes, justified by rhetoric, enabled by the willing ignorance of its beneficiaries.
Americans have never faced on their own soil the kind of violence they export overseas. They have never watched their elementary schools collapse on their children. They have never fled their homes with nothing but what they could carry, never buried their families in mass graves, never wondered if the next drone strike would find them. Geography and history have conspired to shield the American homeland from the consequences of American foreign policy. The wars are fought elsewhere, the bodies are buried elsewhere, the displaced flee elsewhere.
And so the jokes continue. The scrolling continues. The comfortable distance between “here” and “there” remains intact.
But distance is not the same as safety, and the weapons exported today have a way of returning, sometimes in forms that cannot be anticipated. The mujahideen of Afghanistan became the Taliban. The training camps of one era become the recruiting grounds of the next. The cycle does not end because one chooses to ignore it, and eventually it bares its bloody teeth.
The Burden of True Change
None of this is to say that the Iranian regime is just. It has imprisoned protesters, executed dissidents, enforced compulsory veiling, and crushed the aspirations of its own people for decades. The women of the Jin, Jiyan, Azadi movement who took to the streets in 2022 did so knowing they might never return home. Mahsa Amini did not return home. Nika Shakarami did not return home. Sarina Esmailzadeh did not return home. The list of names grows longer with every year that the regime clings to power through fear and force.
The people of Iran deserve better. They deserve freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom from the morality police who patrol their choices. They deserve a government that answers to them rather than ruling over them. They deserve change.
But change delivered by bunker-busters is not change. It is invasion dressed in the language of concern. It is the white savior complex reborn in the twenty-first century, wearing the same clothes it wore when colonizers marched through Africa and Asia and the Americas, convinced they were bringing civilization to barbaric peoples. “We are here to save you,” the colonizers said, even as they extracted resources, installed puppet governments, and left destruction in their wake. “We are here to save you,” the bombers say today, even as their targets include schools and sports facilities and hospitals.
True change does not arrive on the wings of B-2 stealth bombers. True change does not come from foreign nations deciding which regime deserves to fall and which deserves to stay. True change emerges from within. From the courage of people who risk everything to demand a better world. From the slow and painstaking work of building institutions that answer to citizens rather than foreign powers. From the recognition that no outsider can liberate a people who have not liberated themselves.
The historical record is clear on this point. Every regime deposed by Western intervention in the Middle East has collapsed into something worse. Iraq after Saddam: sectarian civil war, the rise of ISIS, a fragile state carved into zones of influence. Libya after Gaddafi: failed statehood, open-air slave markets, rival governments, militias ruling where law once stood. Afghanistan after the Taliban were first toppled: two decades of occupation, billions of dollars spent, and finally, the eventual return of the Taliban, who came more ruthless than before.
The pattern is not coincidence; it is consequence. When foreign powers topple a regime, they do not build democracy in its place. They build a vacuum of power that is never backed by established institutions or assistance from those who created it. And vacuums, in the Middle East as everywhere else, are filled not by the most democratic forces but by the most organized, the most ruthless, the most willing to kill.
The people of Iran know this. They know that American bombs do not discriminate between Revolutionary Guards and schoolchildren. They know that the same government now raining missiles on Tehran has armed and funded regimes across the region that oppress their own people. They know that the rhetoric of liberation is a mask for interests far older and far colder than any concern for Iranian lives.
And so they mourn their dead. The children of Minab, the athletes of Tehran, the protesters executed in Evin Prison—they wait. They wait for a change that will come from within, if it comes at all. They wait for a world that does not use their suffering as justification for more suffering. They wait for life even when death is adamant to be the only angel that resides in that land. They wait, as colonized peoples have always waited, for the saviors to stop saving them long enough to let them live.
What Remains
On March 3, 2026, the death toll from U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on Iran stood at 555. Among them, 148 children. Among them, girls who went to school on an ordinary morning and never came home.
The strikes also killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. They killed the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mohammad Pakpour. They killed the chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Abdul Rahim Mousavi. They killed the secretary of the Iranian Defense Council, Ali Shamkhani. They killed the defense minister, Aziz Nasirzadeh.
Leadership can be replaced. Governments can be restructured. But the children of Minab cannot be returned to their families. The athletes killed in Tehran—eighteen of them, women who trained and competed and dreamed—cannot run again. The patients in damaged hospitals cannot be healed by the facilities that no longer exist.
And across the region, the suffering continues. In Gaza, the genocide continues. In Lebanon, the strikes continue. In Bahrain, in Qatar, in Kuwait, in the UAE, in Saudi Arabia, in every country touched by this conflict, people are dying, fleeing, mourning.
The cycle continues because it has always continued. Because the lessons of history are acknowledged and then ignored. Because the powerful believe they are exempt from the patterns that govern everyone else.
But history does not grant exemptions. It repeats. It returns. It reminds, in ways both subtle and violent, that every action has consequences, every choice has costs, every war plants the seeds of the next.
The question is not whether the cycle will continue. It will. The question is whether those caught within it will be remembered: not as statistics, not as numbers, not as convenient illustrations for an argument, but as people. As children who wanted to grow up. As women who wanted to run. As families who wanted nothing more than to live in peace.
And so the question remains: when history repeats its cycles again—when the blood is spilled and the lives are lost and the mothers are crying again—will anyone stay to notice?