Them.
Them.
Not us.
Never us.
We made sure of that.
We drew the lines. Built the borders.
Sharpened language until it bled.
We named the scapegoats before the fire even started.
And then we told ourselves they struck first.
We love a villain in this country.
We always have.
Someone to point at when the walls start to fall.
Someone to blame when the world stops making sense.
Not the real villains—
Not the ones in glass towers.
Not the people who raise glasses to your ruin.
Not the ones with private jets and public immunity.
No. We leave them alone.
They’re too clean.
Too powerful.
Too far removed.
So we look down. We look sideways.
And we find THEM.
The boats.
The borders.
The brown skin.
The wrong accent.
The wrong prayers.
The wrong grief.
Not born here? Then born guilty.
Fleeing war we funded? They should’ve stayed put.
Risked drowning for their children? They should’ve known better.
Their babies don’t count like ours do.
We rage at the man in the dinghy
while the man in the Bentley launders your tomorrow.
We mock the single mother on £88 a week
while our leaders spend that on lunch
and charge it to you—the taxpayer.
We say “we’re full.”
But full of what?
Fear.
Bitterness.
Quiet compliance and loud cruelty.
A million folded arms, a million mouths muttering
“Well, it’s not my problem.”
We scream “take back control.”
But we never had it.
Not of our borders. Not of our lives.
Not even of our own kindness.
We gave it away.
To people who made us feel seen
for just long enough to sign away our souls.
They told us to fear each other.
And we obeyed.
But here’s the part that won’t let me sleep:
They have a “them” too.
To the refugee, it’s you.
To the boy chased through school halls for his name—
it’s your newspaper.
To the girl silenced by shame or law—
it’s the people who looked away.
Everyone’s shouting.
Everyone’s bleeding.
No one is listening.
We are all someone’s THEM.
But some carry that label to the grave.
Right now—
Children lie buried beneath the rubble of Gaza,
their names never spoken by the mouths that dropped the bombs.
Dreams crushed before they ever became memories.
In Ukraine—children stolen from beds,
shipped across borders by an enemy who calls them theirs.
They’ll grow up speaking a language
their parents died trying to resist.
They’ll forget the lullabies they once heard in the dark.
In Afghanistan—girls stare through windows they’re no longer allowed to open.
The future gone.
Replaced by silence.
By shame.
By the smallness forced on them
by cowards with power and flags.
And still—
we debate if they deserve our borders.
If their trauma meets the threshold of British sympathy.
We turn suffering into a numbers game.
We weigh their worth in column inches and policy PDFs.
As if grief needs permission.
As if pain requires paperwork.
They are not invaders.
They are the wreckage of our bombs,
our silence,
our politics.
They are the cost of “them.”
They were never them.
They were us—
before we drew the line.
And maybe the ugliest truth is this:
We didn’t just let it happen.
We helped it along.
Every silence.
Every scroll.
Every “not my problem.”
Every time we voted cruelty in
and called it tough love.
Every time we shared the lie
because the truth was too uncomfortable.
But I’m not clean in this either.
I’ve looked away.
I’ve drawn lines.
I’ve pointed fingers.
I’ve stayed quiet
when I should have screamed.
That’s why I’m writing this.
Because the rot isn’t out there anymore.
It’s in me.
It’s in all of us.
And still—beneath the noise, something flickers.
We all cried when our children were born.
We all dreamed once—
of being astronauts, or poets, or bus drivers.
Of peace. Of love. Of something kind.
We all felt heartbreak.
Even if we never said it out loud.
We all looked up at the same sky
and wondered if we mattered.
We walk the same rock,
spinning through the same darkness,
aching to be held.
To be heard.
To be seen.
We are already united—
in fear,
in grief,
in the quiet, stubborn need
to be understood.
If we must have a “them”—
if we must draw a line in the soil—
then let it be this:
I’ll be your them, if you’ll be mine.
But don’t dare look away.