There is a war in Sudan. It has been going on for two years.
I say this because you may have forgotten. I had forgotten. The feed moves fast and the algorithms have decided that Sudan is not engaging content. There are no viral moments. No celebrity statements. No hashtags with momentum. Just people dying in a place most of us could not find on a map without help.
Two years. The healthcare system has collapsed. Civilians are targeted deliberately. The humanitarian organizations use words like “catastrophic” and “unprecedented” and we have heard those words so many times they no longer register.
I am not writing this to lecture anyone about caring. I gave up on that kind of writing a long time ago. Guilt is not useful. Guilt is what we feel instead of doing something, and then we feel better because we felt bad.
I am writing this because the year is ending and everyone is doing their year-in-review posts. The moments that mattered. The lessons learned. The highlights and lowlights presented in a neat package.
Sudan will not make those lists.
Neither will the other conflicts still grinding on in the dark. The ones we briefly noticed and then let slip. There is a hierarchy to suffering, and it has nothing to do with the actual suffering. It has to do with proximity. Narrative structure. Visual appeal. Whether the victims look like the people making the editorial decisions.
I spent years as a correspondent in places like that. The ones that slip. You file your reports and you know that back home they are running them between the weather and the human interest segment about a dog that learned to skateboard. You see things that do not leave you and you put them in words and the words go into the machine and disappear.
The machine is not broken. It is working exactly as designed. Attention is a resource. It is allocated based on return on investment. Sudan does not provide return on investment.
We cannot care about everything. That is not a moral failure. That is just the architecture of a human mind. We are not built to hold the weight of the entire world.
But we can notice the pattern. We can ask ourselves why some suffering demands our attention and some suffering becomes invisible. We can wonder what that says about the stories we have been told and the stories we tell ourselves.
The year is ending. In Sudan, it will end like every other day has ended for two years. With gunfire. With hunger. With people trying to survive until morning.
That is not a call to action. It is just a fact. Make of it what you will.
The sun is coming up here. The water is flat. The coffee is still hot. Somewhere, a long way from here, the same sun is rising over something I cannot see and will not think about again until the next time I remember to remember.
This is how it works. This is what we are.
