Mary Turfah

The hardest part about living here is the complacency I am expected to feign outside the walls of my home.

Inside, I am glued to the Arabic news all morning. This, and Twitter: I refresh my feed like clockwork. I am waiting to see what is next.

On Thursday, the United States assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' (IRGC's) Quds Force, and a key military figure in the Middle East.

On my Twitter timeline, the hashtag #NoWarWithIran is trending. I read this and find myself saying aloud — to the world, and to no one— It’s too late. Under international law, Soleimani’s assassination constitutes an act of war, as he was an Iranian state actor. Now we all wait to see how Iran chooses to respond.

Americans an ocean away may not feel the consequences of this death, except perhaps in the rise of the cost of oil, or a surge in the price of defense industry stocks.

But consequences there will be.

I am a student on my winter holiday break, and I decide to head to a coffee shop to work on a memoir I am ghost-writing. Life goes on, I tell myself.

The barista greets me with a big smile: "How are you? How’s your new year so far?"

Do you know what your government — our government — just did? I want to blurt. Maybe he doesn't know. Not his fault, I tell myself. Not his issue.

Iran went too far:Donald Trump showed restraint, then resolve, in killing of Iran's Qassem Soleimani

I find myself wishing I were someplace else, maybe Lebanon, where my parents were born and where many of my family members still reside. Where I know the stranger in front of me would read my eyes and recognize — even share — the anxiety I feel. That Lebanese stranger would cut the small talk and ask what I think will happen next, and he would nod when I admit I have no idea. I wish today I were surrounded by people for whom compassion fatigue is less of an option.

But here I am, in the suburbs of Detroit. So I smile back at the barista. "So far, so okay," I say.

I am worried for my relatives

I’ve experienced loss and its anticipation, and I know life goes on. But not like this. Not when your cousin’s life, or your grandpa’s, is at stake. And not when the country on your passport, the government to which you pay your taxes, is the reason.

On cable news, commentators call the decision to kill Soliemani a "miscalculation." But human life is not a decimal place error. I am worried for my family, for my grandpa’s home, for the roses my grandmother planted decades before her death, roses my dad waits to smell every summer.

Mistake to leave nuclear deal:Attack on US Embassy in Iraq shows Trump is failing. He walked into Iran's trap.

And I am worried for my fellow American citizens, who seem to be more concerned about an imaginary attack on American soil or a #WWIII (another trending hashtag) than about the very immediate cost of this escalation. Iraqis and Iranians, whose guilt is no more real than Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, will die.Have been dying.

I am worried because unless we understand the reality of others’ suffering, unless we shake off this collective numbness that blankets our senses after every drone strike, every bombing, every ground invasion, unless we learn to think beyond the edges of our national selves, we cannot adequately resist these endless wars.

The hashtag #NoWarWithIran means nothing if we do not open ourselves to understanding what war means for those already living it.

Mary Turfah, who grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, is pursuing a medical degree at the University of Michigan Medical School and a master's degree in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. This column first appeared in the Detroit Free Press.