From Above

I’m indie writer Teague de La Plaine. This is Open Logbook—a public log of observations on humanity, shared systems, and the long future.

“Soon you will have forgotten everything. Soon everything will have forgotten you.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.11

When you pull back far enough, borders blur.

From high above—high enough that nations shrink to patterns and centuries compress into moments—you stop seeing flags first. You see people. Densities. Movements. Fear and hope cycling like weather systems.

Marcus Aurelius wrote about this view. Not as an escape, but as a corrective. A way to remind himself that emperors and slaves, conquerors and conquered, all dissolve into the same dust when time has had its say.

I try to take that view now.

Because up close, the present moment is unbearable.

Professionally, my work supports Israel. That is a fact of institutions, alliances, and the world as it is. Personally, when I look at Gaza—at civilians compressed into ever-shrinking spaces, at children inheriting trauma before language—I feel the old, familiar sickness of empire. The same smell history always gives off when power justifies itself.

From above, this is not a story of good and evil.

It is a story of systems.

Empires draw lines. Markets flow through them. Weapons follow money. Aid follows optics. Suffering follows all of it.

We like to tell ourselves these conflicts are ancient, inevitable, tribal. That story is convenient. It lets modern power off the hook. But from altitude, you can trace the scaffolding clearly: colonial borders, strategic patronage, extractive economics, security rationales layered atop human cost.

This does not absolve violence. It explains its persistence.

From above, I see Israel as a state acting according to the logic all states are trained in: survival, deterrence, leverage. I also see Palestinians as a people caught inside a machine that has never truly accounted for their humanity except as a variable.

Those two truths can exist at once. If they couldn’t, philosophy would be a lie.

Marcus warned against surrendering our inner citadel to rage or despair. Not because anger is false—but because it blinds us to what remains within our control. I cannot steer history. I cannot rebalance power. I cannot redeem a century of decisions made before I was born.

But I can refuse the lie that anyone here is abstract.

From above, there are no “targets,” no “collateral,” no “necessary losses.” Those are words invented at ground level to make unbearable things sound manageable.

There are only people—living brief, fragile lives inside forces they did not design.

The temptation, especially for those of us embedded in institutions, is numbness. To outsource moral discomfort to policy language. To let proximity to power replace proximity to truth.

I don’t want that bargain.

So I sit with the discomfort. I let it inform the future I’m trying to imagine—one less obsessed with growth, domination, and control; one that understands security as mutual, not extractive; one that recognizes that no system built on permanent humiliation can remain stable.

From above, history does not ask us to be pure. It asks us to be honest.

Empires fall. Markets reconfigure. Flags change. What remains is how we treated one another while believing our moment was permanent.

This is not a call to sides. It’s a call to scale.

Pull back far enough, and the question stops being who is right.

It becomes: what kind of world keeps producing this—and what are we willing to change to stop it?

All One/Teague

48.8767° S, 123.3933° W