Permission

I followed the attack counts from Germany that summer because I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading. Berlin. Dresden. Freital. Five men corner a family at a red light and beat them because of their faces. A jogger gets his head smashed. A kid takes a punch from a grown man because her parents look foreign. By June there were 130 recorded attacks. Fires at shelters. People throwing rocks at paramedics.

What got to me wasn’t the violence itself—people are always capable of that. It was how fast it became systematic. Three on one feels safe. Stay out of sight. Nobody important cares enough to stop you. By summer these men were showing up on Friday nights like it was a job, the only job that ever made them matter. Something to do when you have nothing else. Someone to hurt when that’s the only way you know to feel powerful.

I kept reading the same scenario described over and over. A family flees war. Loses half of everything. Travels for months through hell convinced there’s someplace safe to land. They get to a shelter. They look out the window. They hear screaming. They understand immediately what comes next if they step outside—what comes next on any Friday night when there’s nothing else to do and no one’s watching.

That’s not hypothetical. That’s what’s actually happening. Not once. Not in one place. Systematically. All over. The Germans are known for efficiency. Now you see what it looks like when it gets pointed at people who can’t fight back.

So imagine you escape war. You lose your family. You travel for months through absolute nightmare. You think you’re going to be safe. You open the window and hear men screaming at your kid. And you understand—this could happen anywhere. Safety is just a room with glass, and eventually someone tests whether it breaks.