A coworker walked into the office the other day and said to the room,
“Have y’all gotten any telemarketer calls? I haven’t gotten any since we bombed Iran.”

He’s a forty-year veteran of the company. He is the type of man who has spent decades making tasteless remarks. He does it with a quiet confidence, knowing he won’t be challenged. Central Florida is still The South in many ways. A place where prejudice often hides behind easy smiles and dresses itself up in patriotism.

“Don’t you dare,” I said, looking up as he approached.

Smiling, feigning innocence, he doubled down.
“I’m just saying — I haven’t gotten one telemarketer call since they bombed Iran.”

I asked him which part of of the bombings he found amusing.

Was it the children who were killed?
Or the innocent men and women, the elderly, whose lives were reduced to his punchline?

I continued that one of the problems with Americans is that war almost never reaches our homes. It doesn’t rattle our windows at night. It doesn’t turn our neighborhoods into rubble. Because of that distance, it becomes easy to joke about. Easy enough that the deaths of strangers can be turned into office humor.

He didn’t argue. He just walked away. Sat down at his desk.

A few minutes later, his phone rang.

“Hello? Hello? Goodbye.” It was a telemarketer.

I couldn’t help but notice the timing.

What unsettles me most is not the joke itself. It’s the ease with which some people detach from the suffering of others. There seems to be a growing population in this country that only recognizes tragedy when it touches their immediate bloodline.

Everything else becomes background noise.

I wonder sometimes where that numbness comes from. Is it the political climate we are living in? The long shadow of racist policies that have shown us whose lives matter and whose don’t? Is it the way violence is packaged in entertainment, video games, and endless social media feeds until real human suffering begins to feel abstract?

Or have we simply grown comfortable living far enough from the consequences of our own power, that empathy feels optional?

Either way, it seems the farther away the bombs fall, the easier it is for people to laugh.