What a Privilege.
What a privilege it is to wake up and move through your day without wondering if today will be the day your family is torn apart.
What a privilege to leave the house without checking your parents’ location, without texting to make sure they made it to work safely and will make it home at all.
What a privilege to scroll past the headlines. To ignore the raids, the deportations, the families separated by policies that treat human beings like problems to be removed.
What a privilege to sit in a classroom and feel safe, while classmates laugh, stay silent or celebrate the suffering of people who look like you, speak like you, or share your last name.
What a privilege to never have the “just in case” talk. The one where parents explain what to do if they don’t come home. The one where children learn emergency plans instead of bedtime stories.
What a privilege to never have to send your parents lists of places to avoid. To never fear that the color of your skin, your accent or your existence could put your life at risk.
What a privilege to live without the weight of constant fear. To exist without your entire life feeling like it’s on pause.
And what a privilege it is to stay silent. To be ignorant because it doesn’t affect you directly. To mistake comfort for innocence.
You don’t have to shout hatred to be part of the problem. Silence and comfort speak loudly on their own. Silence is not neutral; it is compliance.
History has shown us what happens when suffering is ignored.
In her diary, Anne Frank described a world where families were taken from their homes, where children returned from school to find their parents gone, and where no one knew when the fear would end. She wrote those words in 1942.
It is now February 2026, and her reality feels uncomfortably familiar. Families are still being separated. Children are still left waiting. People are still being treated as disposable.
History does not repeat itself because people forget; it repeats itself because people stay comfortable. Because they look away. Because they convince themselves it is not their problem.
Privilege is not something to feel guilty for. But it is something to recognize. Because while some people wake up free from fear, others wake up bracing for loss. And the difference between those realities is not accidental; it is created by systems, policies and the willingness of society to stay silent.
