I want to tell you something about my job that I have never said out loud before.
Part of what I do is manage our social media. I make the edits. I choose the footage. I decide how to package the reality of what is happening in Gaza and Sudan and Afghanistan into something small enough and sharp enough to stop a thumb mid-scroll.
I am good at it.
And that fact alone should tell you something about the world we are living in.
This week I was sitting at my desk watching a video of children in Gaza. Bleeding. Dying. Small bodies in the kind of chaos that should never exist anywhere near a child. I was watching it the way I watch all of them now, which is to say professionally, with the part of my brain that is already thinking about aspect ratios and caption length and optimal posting times.
And my first thought, I promise you I am not exaggerating, was:
A Kendrick Lamar song would be perfect for this.
I sat with that for a long time afterward.
Not the video. My reaction to it. The fact that I watched children dying and my brain went immediately to music selection. The fact that somewhere between caring deeply about these children and doing this job every day, I had developed a skill set that should not exist. The ability to look at suffering and think about its potential reach. To watch a child bleed and hear a beat underneath it.
That is not who I was when I started this work.
That is who this world made me become to do it.
Here is the part that keeps me awake.
It works.
That is the most dystopian sentence I have ever written and I need you to sit inside it. The posts where children are bleeding go viral. The edits with the right song, the right cut, the right caption get shared hundreds of thousands of times. People who would never donate, who would never stop scrolling for a news article or a charity appeal, will watch thirty seconds of a dying child set to music and feel something and share it and for one brief moment the algorithm decides that this suffering is worth showing to the world.
We have figured out how to make children's pain trendy.
And it works.
And I do not know what to do with that except tell you.
I think about the children in those videos sometimes. Not as content. As children. The specific, breathing, irreplaceable human beings whose worst moments I am sitting at a desk deciding how to package. Who have no idea that somewhere a young woman is choosing a soundtrack for their suffering. Who are just trying to survive while the world decides whether their pain is shareable enough to care about.
They deserve better than going viral.
They deserve a world that does not need to be tricked into paying attention to a dying child.
They deserve help that does not depend on whether the edit lands.
But we are not in that world.
We are in this one. Where a child has to bleed to the right song to get enough eyes on them to survive. Where I have to be good at this to do my job. Where you have probably shared something like this without thinking about what it took to make it or what it cost the child inside it.
I am not blaming you. I am one of the people who made it shareable.
I am just asking you, today, to give without needing the edit.
Without the music. Without the algorithm deciding this child's suffering is trending today.
Just because they are there. And they are bleeding. And they need help whether or not anyone shares it.
For every child who deserved help before they had to go viral to get it,
Hafsa