Why Americans Must Speak Up for Gaza, South Sudan, and the Congo—Even as Democracy Falters at Home
A moral commentary on my news feature from earlier today
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The Shrinking Gaze
I published an article earlier today about some of the most critical crises in the world. I received several comments asking me why I talked so much about crises overseas when American itself is unraveling.
In an era when American democracy itself seems fragile — when voting maps erase voices, courts roll back rights, and authoritarian impulses seep from the margins into the mainstream — it is tempting to shrink our gaze. To imagine that the only task left is to shore up the leaking foundations of our own house.
Democracy itself is wobbling here in the United States. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, erasing a half-century of precedent and signaling the fragility of established rights when subjected to partisan courts.
In 2023, extreme gerrymandering in states like Alabama and North Carolina dismantled the voting power of Black and young voters, even after federal courts declared them unconstitutional.
Since 2020, more than 360 restrictive voting bills have been introduced in state legislatures, with at least 17 states enacting new laws to make access to the ballot harder. Meanwhile, election workers across the country face harassment and death threats simply for counting votes.
The metrics echo the unease: Freedom House now ranks the U.S. a “flawed democracy,” pointing to declining public trust, partisan manipulation of electoral maps, and the spread of political violence.
The geography of democracy’s decline is clear: from Tallahassee to Topeka, Austin to Atlanta, the map is dotted with legislatures where majority rule is being systematically diluted. This is the storm we stand in, and it is precisely why raising our voices about Gaza, South Sudan, and the Congo matters. Democracy is not only about what happens inside our borders—it is about refusing silence wherever power crushes the vulnerable.
Even as the American experiment teeters, we cannot afford to wall ourselves off from the wider world. Our consumption, our foreign policy, and even our silence ripple outward.
Gaza, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo are not abstractions, not distant tragedies unfolding in parallel universes. They are sites where American power, American weapons, and American demand intersect with the most vulnerable people on Earth.
To ignore them is not just to betray others; it is to corrode the very democratic values we claim to defend at home.
Gaza: Where Silence Kills
In Gaza, more than 200,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023. Nearly 70% of the dead are women and children. Another 1.7 million—three-quarters of the enclave’s entire population — have been displaced, crammed into makeshift tents or overcrowded U.N. shelters.
The health system has collapsed. By mid-2024, the World Health Organization reported that only 13 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals were even partially functional. Drinking water has grown scarce: UNICEF estimates that 90% of Gaza’s water supply is unfit for human consumption. The U.N. warned in early 2025 that “full-scale famine” could arrive within months if aid convoys continue to be blocked.
This is not a conflict sealed off by borders. U.S.-manufactured munitions have been recovered in the rubble of schools and hospitals. American tax dollars subsidize the very bombs that fall. In the United States, to remain silent on the genocide is not neutrality—it is complicity in the machinery of destruction.
Genocide in Gaza
200,000+ killed since October 2023, with women and children making up nearly 70% of the dead (U.N., 2025).
1.7 million displaced — three-quarters of the population forced from their homes (OCHA, 2025).
90% of water undrinkable, leaving families dependent on unsafe or trucked-in supplies (UNICEF, 2024).
“Imminent famine” warning issued by the U.N. as food convoys face repeated blockades (WFP, 2025).
Billions in U.S. military aid flow to Israel annually, with U.S.-made bombs recovered in the rubble of schools and hospitals (U.S. State Dept., 2024).
South Sudan: Climate at the Breaking Point
South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, emerged from decades of civil war in 2011 with the fragile hope of peace. Yet in 2025, it is one of the most climate-vulnerable nations on Earth.
Over 9 million people—three-quarters of its population—require humanitarian assistance. Floods, intensified by climate change, have submerged entire swaths of Jonglei, Unity, and Upper Nile states. Since 2020, more than 2 million people have been displaced by rising waters. At the same time, drought cycles have grown more severe, pitting herding communities against one another in violent clashes over dwindling pasture and water.
Food insecurity is catastrophic. The World Food Program reports that 7.1 million South Sudanese face “crisis” or worse levels of hunger in 2025. Nearly 1.6 million children under five are acutely malnourished. These numbers are not the accidents of geography—they are the fingerprints of a destabilizing climate system to which the United States remains one of the largest contributors.
Climate and Conflict in South Sudan
9 million people in need of aid (OCHA, 2025)
2 million displaced by flooding since 2020 (UNHCR, 2024)
7.1 million food insecure, with 1.6 million children malnourished (WFP, 2025)
More than 400,000 killed in civil conflict since 2013 (Council on Foreign Relations, 2023)
The Democratic Republic of Congo: The Cost of Our Devices
If Gaza is the site where American bombs fall and South Sudan where American emissions haunt, then the Democratic Republic of Congo is where American consumption takes its purest extractive form.
The DRC is the world’s largest source of cobalt—supplying over 70% of the global market—and a key producer of copper and coltan, minerals essential to smartphones, laptops, and the batteries driving the clean-energy revolution. But the cost is staggering.
UNICEF estimates that 40,000 children work in DRC’s mines, exposed to toxic dust and the constant risk of tunnel collapse. Armed groups finance their wars through mineral extraction, fueling a cycle of violence that has displaced over 7 million people in the country’s east. The U.N. reports that more than 25 million Congolese need humanitarian aid in 2025, making it one of the largest and most neglected crises on Earth.
When Americans tap on smartphones or plug in electric vehicles, the DRC is present in every flicker of the screen and every mile driven. Geography doesn’t let us escape responsibility; it insists we recognize our complicity.
Cobalt and Smartphones
70% of global cobalt comes from the DRC (USGS, 2024)
40,000 children estimated in cobalt mines (Amnesty International, 2023)
7 million displaced by armed conflict (OCHA, 2025)
25 million in need of humanitarian assistance (U.N., 2025)
Why Speaking Matters
It can feel indulgent, even futile, to speak of foreign suffering while democracy itself falters here at home. But the act of speaking—the refusal to let brutality become background noise—is itself democratic practice.
When authoritarianism tightens its grip domestically, silence becomes easier. We grow accustomed to swallowing outrage, to reserving our voices for only the most local of fights. But democracy depends on the opposite instinct: on the willingness to name injustice wherever it occurs, and to demand accountability from those in power.
A map is not only a representation of land but of responsibility. Rivers cross borders, carbon knows no passport, and weapons carry their manufacturer’s marks across oceans.
To speak up for Gaza, South Sudan, and the DRC is to remember that democracy is not just the machinery of elections. It is the chorus of citizens insisting—loudly, imperfectly, but insistently—that every human life has value.
American Links to Global Crises
Weapons: U.S. provides $3.8 billion annually in military aid to Israel, much of it used in Gaza (U.S. State Department, 2024).
Emissions: The U.S. remains the world’s second-largest carbon emitter, directly tied to climate impacts like South Sudan’s floods (Global Carbon Project, 2024).
Consumption: Each smartphone sold in the U.S. contains cobalt mined in the DRC. Apple, Tesla, and others source from Congolese supply chains (Amnesty International, 2023).
The crises in Gaza, South Sudan, and the Congo are not foreign — they are bound up with our policies, our consumption, our silence. To speak for those who cannot is not a distraction from the fight for democracy in America; it is a fulfillment of it.
Democracy is not only a matter of ballots cast but of voices raised. In refusing to go silent, we resist not only foreign brutality but also the corrosion of our own civic life. And in that act of solidarity, across oceans and fault lines, we may keep alive the possibility that democracy—here and everywhere—still has a chance.
References
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Gaza Humanitarian Emergency Updates. (2024–2025).
World Health Organization. Gaza Health Crisis Reports. (2024).
United Nations World Food Programme. South Sudan Situation Report. (2024).
UNICEF. Child Displacement and Hunger in South Sudan. (2023–2024).
UNHCR. Displacement Data for South Sudan. (2024).
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Democratic Republic of Congo Humanitarian Response Plan. (2025).
Amnesty International. Child Labor in Cobalt Mines of the DRC. (2023).
U.S. Department of State. Security and Human Rights in the DRC. (2024).
McKibben, B. (2021). The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon. (for thematic framing).
Discussion of the 'silent majority' is had here at 52, 53 minutes in-- https://johnbatchelor.substack.com/p/america-in-vietnam-1964-1975 . There's just this universe of damned things we go by in our day-to-day, in which we go on from the last time any of us may have cried on our mother's shoulder. We call it 'progress' but it's a condition of stasis or of normality perpendicular to the plain of lived reality for increasing milliards worldwide. What differentiates it from true things to want to be concerned about is its insistence on a test of claims to knowledge and perception that unseat monetization and a superstructure of pelf-- https://scienceandculture.com/2025/07/an-ancient-argument-for-the-soul/ .