“I was a small child when my country invaded Iraq, along with the United States and a few other nations. The war was news, yes. But that’s all it was. Even our own soldiers were more numbers than real people. I’d hear that two Royal Marines had died in a roadside bombing, and it meant less to me than when my neighbor broke his leg slipping down the stairs.”

“War isn’t like that for us,” Manny said, “I don’t know anyone in Austin who hasn’t lost a friend, or family, to the fighting. It affects us all.”

“So it does, my boy. So it does. And if any of our warriors die today, you can bet it’ll effect everyone in this social experiment we call a city. But you didn’t let me finish. The thing that was truly toxic about my childhood knowledge of war, is that it erased the other side. Our boys didn’t do body counts. So there were seldom reports on how many civilians we killed, how many enemy fighters died. That information was out there, but you had to look hard. Most people never did.”

Donald Farris shrugged, and then winced from the motion.

“It’s easy to get people to care about their own soldiers. But if you want to stop wars, or at least make them less common, you’ve got to get people to give a shit about the soldiers on the other side. That, my young friend, is where your people are even worse than my own. You’re close enough to the war to not just feel indifferent about these Martyrs marching off to die. You actively want them to die. That’s understandable. But it’s also poisonous. When you dehumanize others, you become less human yourself.”

Manny nodded, not sure of what to say.

“In my youth,” Donald Farris continued, “the country that occupied this continent was the most powerful nation on earth. They held the keys to the deadliest military machine ever constructed. It was easy to get Americans to support involvement in a thousand little conflicts, because each only required a small fraction of the nation’s military power. It only risked a few American lives. But millions of people around the world died. Women and children and old men and dumb, young boys from Yemen to Turkey to Guatemala. To justify those murders Americans had to make those people less than human. And once they’d done that, it wasn’t such a great jump to do it to their neighbors.”

He stared up at the setting sun, and Manny saw tears in his eyes.

“What you’re going to see tomorrow is the best attempt I’ve seen, so far, to bridge the empathy gap between a people and their foes.”

Chapter 23

Sasha.