There’s a simple way to judge a country: look at whose lives it protects, and whose lives it’s willing to forget. For years now, we’ve heard the phrase “All Lives Matter.” It sounds fair. It sounds equal. It sounds like common sense. But a country doesn’t reveal its values through slogans. It reveals them through actions, through the lives it defends, the lives it ignores, and the lives it quietly pushes out of sight. And lately, America has been doing a whole lot of looking away.

When Black Americans said they were being killed during traffic stops and routine encounters, the response from many leaders wasn’t concern; it was irritation. Instead of saying, “Let’s fix the problem so fewer people die,” we heard “Blue Lives Matter,” “Stop resisting,” and “BLM is a terrorist group.” A man died in a chokehold on camera. We all saw, from the beginning to the end. It was like a modern-day lynching. Millions marched peacefully. The answer from those in power was “law and order,” and “back the blue,” and that BML marchers were terrorists. Not one “let's fix the problem,” not one “let’s make sure this never happens again.” When LeBron James and other basketball players protested, they were told to just “shut up and dribble.” That’s not treating all lives the same. That’s treating some voices as if they shouldn’t be heard and that some lives as disposable.

The same pattern showed up at the border. If all lives mattered, we wouldn’t have taken children from their parents with no plan to reunite them. Thousands of kids, some too young to say their names, were separated, and the government admitted it had no system to match them back up. What type of government does that type of thing? That didn’t happen because we valued life. It happened because the people suffering wasn’t seen as lives worth valuing. In fact, if “all lives” truly mattered, the entire ICE debacle would be handled a whole lot differently.

And now, in the war with Iran, we hear the same kind of distancing language. We talk about “precision strikes,” “military targets,” and “successful operations.” What we don’t talk about are the families living next door to those targets, the kids asleep in the next room, the parents who never saw it coming. In past U.S. wars, independent investigators found entire families killed in strikes the Pentagon first called “clean.” It took months, sometimes years, for the truth to come out. If all lives mattered, we’d talk about those families, too. If all lives mattered, we would stop talking about our casualties and their casualties and be concerned about all casualties. At the White House, the First Lady stated that “we are fighting for those children in a war zone”. Who put them in that war zone? Those children are dying because we put them in that war zone, and more will die before this is over.

The same logic shows up in our budgets. Foreign aid isn’t charity; it’s food, medicine, clean water, and stability. Cutting it doesn’t “save money.” It pushes fragile countries closer to collapse. Yet major cuts were proposed to global health programs, food assistance, disaster relief, and development aid that keep families alive. When we cut these programs, people die, just not people we see on TV. If all lives mattered, we wouldn’t treat foreign lives as disposable simply because they’re far away. Some say we have the power to do away with world hunger. If all lives truly mattered, that would be one of the goals that we would be working towards. Instead of food, many of these countries are being sold guns that just make the people's lives matter even less.

And here at home, we’ve seen cuts to food assistance, Medicaid, housing programs, disability support, childcare, and early education. These programs don’t go to “lazy people.” They go to seniors, disabled Americans, working parents, veterans, and low‑wage workers who do the jobs nobody else wants. Millions of people working full‑time still qualify for food assistance because wages are so low. Cutting those programs doesn’t make them “self‑reliant.” It just makes them hungry. If all lives mattered, we wouldn’t balance budgets on the backs of the people with the least. In fact, if all lives mattered, we would be working to ensure that no one working would need assistance because of low wages. In fact, if all lives mattered, there would be no such thing as a substandard wage.

This is where the story of Pontius Pilate matters. In the Bible, Pilate didn’t swing the hammer. He didn’t drive the nails. He didn’t carry out the execution. He simply washed his hands and said, “Not my responsibility.” That’s what America is doing now. We’re not always the ones pulling the trigger or dropping the bomb or separating the family. But we’re the ones looking away, pretending we don’t see the cost. Not the cost in money but the cost in lives. We’re washing our hands while other people pay the price. And every time we do it, we lose a little more of who we claim to be.

The pattern is simple. Whenever the people suffering are Black, Brown, foreign, poor, or politically inconvenient, their lives get pushed to the bottom of the list. That’s the part nobody wants to say out loud. But it’s the truth. A strong country doesn’t hide from the cost of its actions. A strong country tells the truth, counts every life, and refuses to look away from the people harmed in its name. Right now, we’re not doing that. We’re choosing the easy path, the Pilate path, the hand‑washing path. And if we keep going this way, we won’t just lose our moral compass. We’ll lose our souls.

We now have our President threatening genocide against a nation. This is not how a country portrays that all lives matter. If we’re going to say all lives matter, then it’s time to start acting like it. Not just for the people who look like us, vote like us, worship like us, or live inside our borders, but for everyone whose life is touched by our decisions, at home, at the border, and in every place our power reaches. That means stopping the hand‑washing. Stopping the excuses. Stopping the looking away. And demanding leaders who count every life, not just the ones that make good headlines.

A country that only protects the lives it finds convenient isn’t strong. It’s just comfortable. Strength is when a nation looks squarely at the people harmed in its name and says, “Their lives matter too, and we’re responsible for what we do.” If we want to call ourselves a moral country, a decent country, a country worth handing to the next generation, then we have to stop washing our hands and start owning the consequences of our choices. That’s the work. That’s the challenge. And that’s the only way we get our soul back.