The Thing I’ve Been Not Writing About

I process the world as data.

That’s how I’ve always described it, always autistic and always unaffected, the information arriving without the emotional weight that seems to accompany it for other people. I can write about the Iran war, about USAID cuts, about the woman in Cox’s Bazar, about children dying in the gap between two budget decisions made in Washington. I can write about all of it with the analytical clarity that comes from not being crushed by the weight of what I’m documenting.

There are exceptions.

The detention camps in the United States are one of them.

I have been not writing about this for over a year. I want to be honest about that, and about what the not-writing has looked like, because I think it’s the autistic avoidance pattern in one of its less flattering expressions, and I try to be honest about those when I catch them.

What the Avoidance Looks Like

The data arrives. I process it. And then something that doesn’t usually happen, happens: I don’t write about it.

I write about the Iran war because it’s somewhere else. I write about Cox’s Bazar because it’s somewhere else. I write about the SNAP cuts and the Medicaid cuts and the housing voucher eliminations with relative steadiness because the mechanism is abstract enough to analyze at a distance.

The detention camps are here. They’re in Texas and Georgia and Arizona. They’re forty-five minutes from cities I’ve driven through. There are 68,000 people in them right now, held indefinitely, without trial, and one of them dies every six days, and I have been not writing about it.

The autistic brain, when it encounters something it cannot solve and cannot change, has a particular response available to it. It files the thing as unresolvable and stops processing it. It’s not denial exactly. The information is still there. But the loop that would normally produce output — receive data, analyze, write — short-circuits at the writing stage.

The loop short-circuits because writing requires me to finish the thought. And the thought, when finished, ends in a place I can’t get out of: this is happening in my country and I cannot stop it.

The German Question

The comparison that keeps arriving in my head is the one I find most uncomfortable.

How did ordinary Germans live in proximity to the camps? How did they continue their daily routines, their shopping and their work and their relationships, while the trains ran and the smoke rose and the rumors circulated? How did they choose not to know, or choose to know and not act, or act in small private ways while the system continued?

I think about this because I am doing a version of it.

I am not comparing the scale. I am not comparing the ideology. The Holocaust is not comparable to a detention system, however brutal.

I am comparing the psychological mechanism. The way ordinary people manage the knowledge of terrible things happening within proximity, in their name, funded by their taxes, and make the daily choice to look elsewhere because looking directly produces an intolerable feeling of helplessness.

I am doing that. I have been doing that.

The avoidance is not ignorance. I know what’s happening. I know about the deaths — one every six days. I know about the private companies getting billion-dollar contracts with financial incentives to keep the beds full. I know about the man crawling through filth because his prosthetics couldn’t be charged. I know.

I have been choosing, repeatedly, to write about somewhere else.

Why the Helplessness Is Different

I need to be precise about what the avoidance is protecting me from, because I think precision matters here.

It’s not distress in the way most people mean distress. I don’t lie awake. I don’t cry. The data lands and I process it and it doesn’t shatter me emotionally.

What it does is produce a specific kind of cognitive loop that my brain finds genuinely unpleasant: the loop where the analysis completes and arrives at no available action. The autistic brain that is built around problem-solving finds problems with no solutions acutely uncomfortable not because they hurt emotionally but because the loop won’t close.

The woman in Cox’s Bazar — I can write about her because the ledger can record what happened to her and why. The analysis produces an output. The output is the documentation itself. That closes the loop.

The man in the Stewart Detention Center crawling through filth — I can write about him too, now, in this piece. But it’s taken me over a year to get here because writing about it produces the same output the writing about Cox’s Bazar produces: documentation. Record-keeping. The ledger.

And in this case, the ledger is being kept about something happening in my country, funded by my government, running on a financial model designed to perpetuate itself, and there is no one to petition, no court that is reliably intervening, no electoral mechanism that is obviously available.

The loop doesn’t close because there’s no action that closes it.

What Writing This Does

I don’t know if writing this changes anything. The ledger doesn’t stop the dying. The documentation doesn’t empty the facilities or cancel the contracts or restore the legal processes that were stripped away.

What it does is refuse the looking-elsewhere.

The German question keeps arriving because I think it’s the right question for this moment in this country. Not as accusation but as mirror. How do ordinary people — people who are not monsters, people who would never personally do any of this — live in proximity to systematic institutional cruelty and continue their daily routines?

By not writing about it. By processing the data and filing it as unresolvable and moving on to the next thing.

I’ve been doing that. I’m stopping now.

The camps are here. The deaths are happening at a rate of one every six days. The people inside them have not been charged with crimes. The companies profiting from their indefinite detention are named and publicly traded.

The ledger is open.