To make plans for tomorrow is an ordinary freedom, so ordinary that we rarely recognise it as one. Arranging work, deciding when to visit someone, expecting a child to come home: much of a life rests on being able to assume that the next few hours will be reasonably safe. Attacks on civilians reach into that modest expectation. They make the business of living conditional.
The CIVICUS Lens report on Yemen centres on a warning that attacks on civilians will continue while those responsible escape punishment. That is an argument about the conditions which allow violence to persist. The reported warning alone cannot establish what would prevent a particular attack, but it deserves attention for something easily lost when suffering becomes familiar: survival does not settle the question of responsibility.
We often admire people who carry on in appalling circumstances. There is good reason to admire them. Yet admiration can become a comfortable stopping place for those watching from safety. The capacity of human beings to endure gives us something hopeful to say, while the circumstances requiring that endurance remain.
A family should be allowed to be unremarkable. Its members should not have to demonstrate extraordinary courage to get through an ordinary day.
There is a difficulty here. Accountability takes time, and punishment cannot be assumed to prevent every further act of violence. People facing danger need protection now. An argument concerned only with eventual justice can become remote from the lives it claims to defend.
Still, that difficulty is no reason to let responsibility disappear. Immediate help and the patient work of establishing who did what belong within the same concern for people’s futures.
For a distant reader, the practical responsibility begins with care over what we accept and repeat. We can distinguish a reported allegation from an established finding without treating uncertainty as permission to stop paying attention. We can support relief while continuing to ask about protection and responsibility. And when we praise someone’s resilience, we can remain interested in whether they will ever be allowed to need less of it.