By Me Self Image Magazine
September 2026 Issue: Beyond Illusions
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Back when the internet was still new and didn’t feel like a giant corporate billboard, you could actually stumble into chat rooms and meet people from anywhere in the world. I was just a kid, talking to whoever popped up, and one of those people happened to be a boy living in Iraq.
We built a real friendship. We talked for a long time about normal, everyday kid stuff—what we liked, what we did during the day, just living our lives. And then, everything shifted.
September 11 was the exact moment in my life where I started to look at the government as corrupt. Watching those towers fall on the television screen—which was the entire event used to justify this war in the first place—I looked at it and I just knew something wasn’t right. The people in those buildings were dying, and the horror was real, but watching the way they came down didn’t make sense. Those buildings were engineered to withstand a plane impact, yet when you looked at the way they collapsed, you saw the patterns of a controlled demolition. You heard the testimonies of people on the ground who heard explosions and saw flashes of light.
Then there was Building 7 right next to them—a building that was never even hit by a plane—that just suddenly dropped straight down. And when it came to the Pentagon, with footage getting immediately confiscated and hidden from the public, I couldn’t believe the official story. Later on in life, finding out about all the things happening behind the scenes made the whole situation look even more suspicious. To me, it looked like an inside job designed to push a specific agenda, manufacture a narrative, and lead us straight into war.
That narrative is what was used to justify tearing another country apart, and it brought the reality of that conflict directly into my conversations with my friend across the world.
I had a front-row seat to watching someone’s entire world get ripped apart in real time. The tone of our conversations flipped almost overnight. I vividly remember the day he told me that he hated the United States, and that he hated every single person who lived here for what was happening to his home.
Hearing that broke my heart, but I understood where his anger came from. I explained to him that right after it happened, so many people directed their rage and hatred at entire countries for what was done to us. But I told him that everyday people living in America have almost zero say in what our leadership decides to do. If the government decides it wants a war, they are going to have their war.
I told him straight up that I don’t hold the actions of a government or powerful leaders against the everyday citizens of a country, because I know they didn’t do it. Just like everyday Americans didn’t want innocent people in other countries to die or get their homes annihilated, everyday people over there didn’t want innocent lives taken either.
He listened, and eventually he told me that he didn’t hate me. I cared about him as a friend, and I never wanted him to think I was someone who would ever want to hurt him—because why would anyone want to harm an innocent person? As time went on and we both grew up and moved past high school, life shifted, things faded into the background, and we eventually lost touch over the years. But he is still someone I think about to this day, and I always find myself wondering if he is okay.
Looking back on all of it now, I see things so much clearer than I used to.
I see why it is so important for those in power to divide people. If we are constantly divided and living in fear, we can never just live in peace—we will always be looking for some leader or government to step in and “save” us. Pitting countries against one another and sending military forces into other lands just creates endless division, hatred, and trauma. It creates the kind of deep emotional and physical wounds that no human being deserves to carry.
Why are we sending our soldiers to fight other soldiers and civilians? Why are we destroying cities and taking innocent lives instead of holding the actual decision-makers accountable? If there is a genuine threat or harm done to a country, you go directly to the leaders making those corrupt choices—you don’t slaughter everyday people and distract the entire world while the real architects of the conflict sit untouched.
When you really examine it, it never felt like it was about protecting everyday citizens. It looked like leadership carrying out personal vendettas, using our military and our people as disposable pawns on a board while the powerful sat back safely behind security walls. If leaders are so eager to start a war and sacrifice innocent lives to settle their disputes, they shouldn’t get to hide away. They should be on the front lines fighting their own battles alongside the very people they put in harm’s way.
There are terrible things that happen in the world, and there are times when people do need help. But so much of this destruction is engineered by governments. We end up fighting the wrong people. We fight against each other when we should be questioning the systems and the leaders who put us there in the first place.
Many people fell for the narrative, but the truth remains that no innocent person should ever have to suffer. We shouldn’t blindly follow anyone. I truly believe that deep down, everyday people just want peace. We lose that peace the moment we let leadership tell us who our enemies are and who we are supposed to be. If we want to heal this world, we have to stop blindly accepting hatred toward people we’ve never met. We have to be willing to look past division, choose empathy, and stand for peace over war.
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