Weeping at work

Think back to the last time you cried at work. Did the tears come after your boss sent you a curt email? Or when you accidentally cc'd (instead of bcc'd) everyone? Maybe you just had a really, really long day and that one last little misstep pushed you over the edge.

In my case, I cry at work – often quite profusely – about once every two weeks. And that's if I'm lucky. The past couple of months? More times than I can count. And not over a nasty email, a rude response, or a mean coworker (of which, I'm proud to say, I have none). No, I'm crying for a simple enough reason: because my job in communications breaks my heart. It does so over and over again. And yet I stay. I keep doing it, tears and all, because I want to make a difference, because I just hate the world I'm trying to change and how cruelly it treats so many people. And I cry because some days (most days, perhaps) I'm not sure I can make a difference at all.

So, what could cause this public relations professional to get that upset? Well, I think it has something to do with what I work on, day in and day out. Most so-called PR flacks I know have portfolios that include things like consumer goods, public health campaigns, or corporations in crisis. Not me. My focus at work is on America's wars and how they are being waged.

As for the crying, it could have something to do with the uplifting – I'm kidding, of course (if you can kid about such things) – Google alerts I receive every single morning, afternoon, and evening. They arrive like clockwork in my inbox just waiting for me to open them and scan the headlines for mentions of drone strikes, airstrikes, or civilian casualties.

On a good day, those headlines in my inbox are, if not uplifting, at least irrelevant to the work I'm doing, which is always a relief: stock market updates or, say, the results of a Jamaican race horse someone thought to name Drone Strike.

But on bad days... On bad days, the e-newsletter I write is filled with weddings that were turned into funerals, civilian death counts that only continue to rise, government denials of wrongdoing, and angry questions like "How could they do this to us?" I wish I could tell you those bad days are rare, but given America's wars that would be a lie. In all honesty, I don't recall a single week since I started working on the issue of drones in March 2017 that they haven't poured in.

Unfortunately, when it comes to America's forever wars, such stories are just a drop in the bucket. Since Trump entered the Oval Office more than 1,000 days ago, the US has only expanded its war on terror, increasing both the number of countries we're bombing and the number of people we're killing.

The president has prioritized might over right, letting the military loosen the rules designed to protect civilians in its war zones and then classify the results, which makes it likely that we'll never know just how many innocent men, women, and children we've actually killed.

Excerpted from: 'Drone Strikes and Tears: Why I Weep While I Work'.

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