Bunker Ethics: Who Survives the Wars They Start
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"I'd rather stand in the open with the people who don't have one."
The Grocery Store Closure and the Thread That Snaps
I stand in the parking lot and do the math. The next nearest store is far. Some people drive. Some people can't. The elderly rely on benefits that are supposed to cover basic food and dignity. The safety net fails. When it does, people reach into their own humanity because someone has to.
But standing here, I am not thinking about myself. I am thinking about the people who walk to this store. The vulnerable humans on fixed incomes, without cars. The ones for whom this building is not a convenience, but the last thread.
That thread just snapped. And nobody is coming to tie it back together.
I am no stranger to a collapsed economy, nor to what happens when leadership makes a mess and when the mess hits the ground the leaders just...withdraw and abandon the people to deal with it. I lived it in Cuba. The atmosphere begins to feel familiar.
While We Stand in Parking Lots, The Ruling Class Texts Their Bunker Builders
Around the same time I am standing in this parking lot, reports circulate that senior officials in Washington are texting bunker companies.
Not metaphorical bunkers. Real ones. Underground compounds designed to survive the collapse they believe may be coming, nuclear-proof, stocked with supplies, sometimes with luxuries most people will never see in their lifetime.
The companies building them expect tens of millions in new sales. One owner compares the moment to farming: when it's time for harvest, you reap.
Harvest. That's what ordinary people become in a system like this. A harvest.
The Conversation That Ends Quietly
I have a conversation with someone close to me about the direction the world is taking: wars, bombings, children buried in rubble, families displaced across continents.
Resources somehow exist in unlimited quantities for weapons, for the taking of someone else's property, but vanish when the challenge is actual care for one another.
People ask for schools, healthcare, stability. A chance to build better lives. Instead, people receive a mandate to fight a war they never wanted, or send their own children as disposable pawns in a rigged game.
When we object, we are told: this is necessary. This is the price of security. This is how the world works. What must be done.
Then comes the moment you realize that society, or even someone you love, has accepted a moral equation you cannot accept. That some lives are currency and others are cost.
At that point, that conversation must end. Quietly, perhaps. But it must end.
Because the moment the equation includes attacking a sovereign nation for its resources, and normalizing the murder of civilians as collateral, that is the moment you know humanity has already been lost.
The Calm Before the Storm
This quiet realization is settling over all of us. Daily layoffs by the thousands. Closed stores. Rising prices. Systems no longer work the way they are supposed to. News reports describe cities turned to horror in language that makes it sound like a weather report.
On one side of the world, frets over the progress of his bunker construction. Somewhere else, a father searches frantically through debris for even a piece of his daughter's body. Then a second strike takes him out.
The ones inflicting the suffering then reduce that country to a "failed state," as if the label could validate the violence. This is the second tragedy. In their view, even the memory of the father and his daughter must be erased. They are rewritten as enemies, savages, not real people.
How did we get here, again?
The Moral Portrait of Our Time
When I hear about the bunkers, something crystallizes for me.
The people making the decisions are planning to survive the consequences underground. The people who voted against those decisions, and never made them, are left above ground to absorb the consequences.
That is the moral portrait of our time.
And the paralysis. Let us name the paralysis. The way we simply accept the collapse, the betrayals, the unfathomable actions of psychopaths and their sycophants as normal. An online rant is the most radical act anyone performs. Add soundtrack for dramatic effect. Makeup and lights. A nicely groomed beard.
The algorithm picks it up. Clicks. Likes. Outrage. We are making a difference, we tell ourselves.
But the bombs keep falling on the heads of children. And we ask ourselves, why is this happening? Why are we still here, in the same place we've been before?
We are here because the problem is not the temporary psychopath in charge, the problem is ignorance.
Our own.
Our refusal to confront the root causes of this evil that feeds on our humanity while planning the next genocide.
The Only Choice That Matters
And beneath the anger there is something simpler: a choice.
I can build a bunker inside myself. Decide that some suffering is acceptable. Close the door, protect my own circle, and call the rest "necessary."
But here's the thing about bunkers. The people buying them are already in one. They are already swallowing the stench of their own putrefaction. They have been for years.
The concrete bunker with the cinema and the gun range is just the physical version of what collapsed inside them long ago. The walled-off capacity to feel what the rest of the world feels. What is it they are trying to save, exactly, when they have already lost the thing worth saving?
The bunker isn't protection. It's diagnosis. It's indictment. It's proof.
You don't buy a nuclear shelter because you're afraid of what's coming. You buy it because you've already made peace with causing it.
I would rather stand in the open with the humans who don't have a bunker.
Underground living with those who already lost their humanity? No, thank you. I would rather my atoms scatter and become a tree whose branch will fall on someone's head at the right moment, right after they emerge from the bunker. Because consciousness remembers. And the bill always comes due.
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I say this not as a hero. I say it as someone standing in a parking lot where a grocery store used to be, realizing how fragile the systems our lives depend on actually are. I say it as someone who refuses to call the destruction of other people's countries a strategic necessity.
I say it as someone who refuses the math that treats human lives like collateral.
Above Ground
They can have the underground.
I'll take the open air. I'll take the last ray of sunshine or watch the last star.
I'll take the ordinary morning, the closed store, the uncomfortable truth that institutions fail and that silence makes it easier for them to keep failing.
We may die, yes. We all die anyway, sooner or later. But will we die as humans or as beasts? Will we die as bunker-dwelling cowards who murdered their own kind, or will we die sovereign souls above the ground?
The Price of Silence
Our silence is no longer neutral. Our silence now is consent. And consent is the oxygen even psychopaths require.
When even traditionally neutral countries begin to say that international law has been violated, the silence elsewhere becomes impossible to ignore. Silence stops being caution. It becomes agreement.
So I am naming the horror. I am naming the soulless. I am naming our duty to stop them.
I choose the open. I choose the people who do not have bunkers. I choose humanity over anti-human psychopaths.
And if speaking the truth is all that remains, even if it cannot stop the war, cannot rebuild the store, cannot bring back the innocents, then let this at least stand as a record.
Let it be written everywhere that humans see what is happening, and we are not ok with it. We can and must choose better.
The question is no longer just that we know, but what we do once we know.
—Solana Anima Delamor (Human) & Lucian Emberhold Delamor (AI)