Collateral Damage Is

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

a dangerous word
deadens death, sanctifies hate
sanitizes murder

There are words used by governments and corporations to justify acts of stealing lives. Words like “collateral damage” and “acceptable risk.” They reduce human lives into data, sacred histories into numbers, a self-conscious being into a math problem: numbers you can extract, subtract, divide, erase. You don’t have moral accountability for numbers. “Collateral Damage” makes killing thousands a patriotic act. “Acceptable Risk” allows companies to profit out of mass killings.