No One is Innocent (Except the Children)
We are taught to believe in innocence. The innocent child, the innocent victim, the innocent voter. But innocence is mostly a myth, a story that keeps the machinery of harm turning while we look away from the oil staining our own hands.
Children are the exception. They are innocent, because they have no choice. They don’t cast ballots that fund wars, they don’t draft policies that cage families, they don’t sign budgets that send bombs into the sky. They inherit the consequences of decisions they never made. Their suffering is the clearest indictment of everything we have built, because it is unearned, undeserved, and unavoidable.
Adults, though, are never innocent. Every ballot cast is an endorsement of harm. Some call it the lesser evil. But lesser evil is still evil, dressed up in civic duty and the perfume of democracy. Voting is not neutral — it is choosing who gets to decide the scale, the rhythm, the choreography of violence. Bombs are signed into law as budgets. Borders are militarised by policies. Families are separated, imprisoned, surveilled — all with the quiet legitimacy of a vote.
To say “I am innocent because I only voted” is to say, “I only opened the door, I did not pull the trigger.” We are all part of the machinery. That doesn’t make us monsters; it makes us implicated. And implication is the condition of life in a system built on extraction and control.
The myth of innocence does more damage than guilt. Innocence tells us there is a clean way to live, a way to wash our hands. It tells us harm is elsewhere, done by other people, by bad people. Guilt at least admits a truth: that we are entangled. That our comforts rest on others’ suffering. That our choices ripple outward into blood and ash.
And what of those who claim neutrality? To stand aside is also to choose. To abstain is not to escape — it is simply to let the machine run on without resistance. In systems like ours, there is no outside. We are all inside the gears, whether turning them or being turned by them.
This is not a call to despair. It is a call to responsibility. If no adult is innocent, then everyone is responsible. Responsibility is not the same as blame; it is the opposite of paralysis. It is the recognition that because our lives are threaded into the lives of others, we can choose how to tug at those threads. To refuse complicity where we can, to expose it where we cannot, to build networks of resistance in the cracks.
Children remain innocent. That is why their deaths cut deepest, and why their survival should be our most urgent demand. They remind us what it looks like to exist before complicity, before compromise. To see their innocence destroyed is to be reminded of the cost of every false claim to purity adults make for themselves.
Voting will not save us. It will not unmake occupations or undo empires. But rejecting the myth of innocence might. Because once we stop pretending anyone is pure, we can start demanding something truer than purity: accountability, solidarity, and courage.
Adults may never escape complicity. But perhaps our truest work is to admit that, to stop hiding behind illusions, and to insist on something braver — not innocence, but responsibility. Not lesser evil, but the courage to dismantle the conditions that make evil inevitable.