First they came for….

Yesterday I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with my family. It wasn’t supposed to be anything heavy. We were just wandering around, reading plaques, making dumb jokes, touching things we weren’t supposed to touch, the usual.

But as we moved through the galleries, I kept noticing the same themes coming up again and again, across centuries, across cultures. Power. Fear. Control. Innocent people getting caught in things they didn’t cause. It was almost unsettling how consistent it was, like physical proof that humans don’t really change as much as we like to think we do.

Then I came across these two pieces together: The Massacre of the Innocents and The Fall of the Giants.

I don’t care what the technical term is for them. They’re three-dimensional scenes frozen in metal. And they stopped me cold.

The titles matter. Especially The Massacre of the Innocents. There’s no wiggle room in that phrase. No abstraction. Innocents are named. What happens to them is named. You don’t have to know anything about art or religion to understand the idea: people who did nothing wrong were harmed because force was unleashed around them.

And right next to it was The Fall of the Giants.

Once I saw them together, I couldn’t unsee it. Cause and effect. You harm the innocent, and eventually the powerful fall. Not immediately. Not cleanly. But the balance always shifts. Karma, if you want to call it that. The scales correcting themselves.

Later that day, I read a CBS article about something that happened in Minneapolis during an ICE operation.

A family was driving home from a basketball game. Kids in the van. They weren’t protesting. They weren’t involved. They were just trying to get home. An enforcement action happened nearby, and a tear gas canister or flash bang went off close enough to injure the children.

Depending on who was reporting it, the details shifted. But the basic fact didn’t: children were hurt during an enforcement action they had nothing to do with.

Then I did what I probably shouldn’t have done and read the comments.

They shouldn’t have been there.

Just stay home.

Wrong place, wrong time.

And that’s where something clicked for me.

That reaction isn’t really about the situation. It’s about self-preservation. It’s about telling yourself, That wouldn’t happen to me because I would make better choices. It pushes the discomfort away. It keeps the world orderly. If you follow the rules, if you stay small enough, if you don’t cross paths with power, you’ll be fine.

But that’s not how it actually works.

People don’t get a warning when enforcement actions happen. You don’t get a push notification saying, “Avoid this neighborhood tonight.” You don’t get to opt out of public space. You’re just living your life, until suddenly you’re not.

This isn’t about pretending force is never justified. In that same situation, there was a separate incident where an agent shot someone who reportedly attacked them. That’s different. Agency matters. Provocation matters. Self-defense matters.

That distinction matters.

What’s disturbing isn’t that force exists. It’s how easily we excuse harm when it lands on people who had no role in what was happening at all. Families. Kids. Bystanders.

I’ve seen what that does to children overseas, in war zones. Ask veterans what stays with them years later, and a lot of them won’t talk about combat first. They’ll talk about the kids. The fear. The confusion. The way a single moment of chaos imprints itself and never fully leaves, even when no one “meant” for it to happen.

We all know, on some level, that hurting children is different. It’s not just sad. It’s destabilizing. It erodes trust in a way that doesn’t repair easily.

Which is why the apathy scares me more than the event itself.

“Just stay home” sounds reasonable until you follow it to its conclusion. It means normal life has to shrink so force can operate freely. It means innocence becomes conditional. It means being present becomes blameworthy.

That’s not a new idea. That’s what those pieces in the museum were showing — not as symbolism, but as history. This is what it looks like when people convince themselves that harm is acceptable because it’s happening “for a reason.”

You massacre the innocents, and eventually the giants fall. History shows that part, too.

The question isn’t whether we’ve seen this before. We have.

The question is whether we recognize it while it’s happening — or only after, when it’s safely framed behind glass