You wake up. You grab your phone. The blue light floods your face in the dark. You see a trending headline: **Iran Protests** and reports of young people being killed. You feel sad for about three seconds. Then you swipe up. Now you are watching a video of a guy making a giant burger. Swipe up again. A cat jumping off a couch. Swipe up. A politician yelling about taxes.

This is how we live now in the age of **social media desensitization**. Horror is just content. It is just noise between ads for shoes you don’t need.

The BBC recently conducted a significant investigation into the **human rights violations in Iran**. They talked to young people on the ground. These kids aren't talking about TikTok trends. They aren't talking about getting famous online. They are talking about watching their friends die during the **crackdown on dissent**. They are talking about blood on the pavement.

One minute you are walking with your friend. You are shouting because you are angry. You are angry because old men tell you how to dress and how to think. The next minute, your friend is gone. Just like that. Because some guy in a uniform was told to pull a trigger.

It makes me sick. But not just because of the killing. Humans have been killing each other since we lived in caves. Killing is the one thing we are really good at. No, what makes me sick is the waste of it all. And the fake caring from everyone else.

Let’s look at the people pulling the triggers: the regime. The big bosses. They are terrified. That is the only reason you shoot a kid in the street. You don't do that if you are strong. You do that if you are weak. You do that if you know your time is up.

These old men sitting on their thrones are scared of teenagers. Think about that. They have all the guns. They have all the money. They have the jails. But they are shaking in their boots because a girl took off a scarf. It is pathetic. It is the definition of cowardice. But cowards with guns are dangerous. They lash out. They break things. They kill the future because they hate that they won’t be part of it.

Now, let’s look at us. The "free world." The West. We love to pat ourselves on the back. We see these brave kids standing up to bullets, and we tweet about it. We put a little flag in our profile picture. We say, "We stand with you."

Do we? Do we really?

No. We don't. We stand in line for coffee. We stand in line for the new phone. We don't stand with anyone. It is all a performance. It makes us feel like good people without having to do anything hard. The politicians are the worst. They give speeches. They use big words about freedom and rights. Then they go back to their offices and make deals. They shake hands with the same monsters they denounce on TV. It is all a game to them.

The Right says they love freedom, but they only care if it fits their agenda. They use these tragedies to score points against their opponents here at home. The Left says they love justice, but they usually just love hearing themselves talk. They turn a massacre into a hashtag. Neither side actually cares about the kid bleeding out on the concrete in Tehran.

That kid died for something real. Most of us haven't done anything real in our entire lives.

The stories the BBC collected are nightmares. Security forces crushing **freedom of speech**. Not just stopping protests—crushing them. Like a boot on an ant. They want to make sure no one ever thinks about speaking up again. They want total silence.

But here is the thing about trying to kill an idea with a gun. It doesn't work. It never works. You can kill the person holding the sign. You can hurt their family. You can lock them up in a dark hole forever. But you can't shoot the anger. You can't put handcuffs on the desire to be free.

When you hurt people like this, you don't make them calm. You make them desperate. And desperate people do not stop.

So the cycle goes on. The old men will keep ordering the young men to shoot the other young men. The world will keep watching on their little screens. We will shake our heads and say, "How terrible." Then we will go back to arguing about sports or movies.

We are a sad species. We have all this technology. We can talk to anyone, anywhere. We can see anything. And we use it to watch each other die in real-time, and then we move on to lunch.

The bravery of those protesters in Iran highlights the cowardice of everyone else. They are fighting for their lives. We are fighting for likes.

I wish I could tell you it will get better. I wish I could say the good guys will win. But I’m not a liar. I don’t know who wins. Usually, the guys with the most bullets win. That is the history of the world. It is ugly. It is stupid. And I am tired of watching it happen over and over again while everyone pretends to be shocked.

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### References & Fact-Check * **Original Report**: [BBC News - 'We all know someone who was killed' - Iran protesters tell BBC of brutal crackdown](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8y2jxx9ppo?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss) * **Context**: The BBC investigation interviewed protesters in Iran describing the violent suppression of dissent by security forces. The report corroborates accounts of lethal force used against civilians.