AGAIN
An Essay on Inadequate Witness
“Immediately cease all activities and avoid additional spending chargeable to the award.”
—USAID termination letter to Gaza humanitarian partners, February 2025
Preface
This essay cost me something to write. I need you to know that upfront.
Not the cost that makes me sympathetic or virtuous. The cost that makes me complicit.
When I wrote There Is a Woman in Gaza in July, I thought it might stay where I placed it, a moment in the archive, a single flare of recognition. But the poem kept pulling at me. It would not stay contained. It kept insisting that what I had written was not the whole of what I had seen.
So I returned to it. I returned because Gaza was still under siege, because aid was still being blocked, because the machinery of managed death kept operating with American funding. I recognized the pattern immediately. Not because I am particularly insightful, but because I have been inside a version of this machinery. I know what it sounds like when systems decide which lives are expendable.
I know my witness is inadequate. I know this essay will not save anyone. I know writing about suffering from safety might be extraction disguised as empathy.
But I also know what silence does when you recognize the pattern.
This is a record of recognition from someone who has been inside the machinery of bureaucratic dehumanization and is funding its deployment elsewhere.
The contradiction does not resolve.
I am asking you to sit with it alongside me.
I know the particular mathematics of survival, how you calculate risk just to exist, to love, to breathe in spaces that would prefer you did not.
Which clinic is safe. Which pharmacy will not look at you like you are already dead. Which emergency room might actually treat your life as worth saving. I have done this math my entire adult life as a Black gay man living with HIV. I have sat in waiting rooms where the institutional silence said everything the doctors would not. I have read the reports that called us disease vectors instead of humans. I have watched administrations debate whether we deserved medicine, deserved research, deserved the dignity of being mourned.
I know how bureaucracies transform people into acceptable losses.
Not as theory. As lived fact. I know what it sounds like when a system decides you are expendable. The particular tone administrators use when they explain why the thing that might save you is not available, not covered, not their department. I know the paperwork euphemisms that make death sound like policy.
I know the specific moment when you realize they have already decided. The outcome was predetermined by systems I cannot see and was never consulted about. Whether I live or die was calculated before I entered the room.
This is not metaphor. This is what Tuesday looks like when the state has already decided your life is a statistic to be managed.
And because I know this, I recognize it operating elsewhere.
My knowledge does not absolve me. It condemns me.
So let me tell you a story.
It is an old story. Older than nations. Older than the specific territories it claims. It is the story of what happens when systems decide which lives matter, which deaths get counted, which communities get blamed for their own elimination. I know this story intimately. I have lived inside a version of it. And I am watching it unfold again, right now, with American funding.
The story goes like this:
There is a territory under siege. Two million people. Mostly refugees from an earlier elimination. Mostly children. The siege has lasted years: seventeen years of calculated restriction, of deciding which foods enter, which medicines, which building materials. Bureaucrats somewhere maintain spreadsheets. The minimum calories to prevent outright starvation while ensuring chronic malnutrition. The maximum electricity to keep the desperate from complete darkness. Enough water to survive. Not enough to live.
This is not war. This is administration.
Then comes the rupture. Violence that justifies tightening what was already suffocation. Now the spreadsheets update. The aid that was restricted becomes aid that is denied. The crossings that were controlled become crossings that are closed. The children who were hungry become children who are starving.
The nation funding this siege calls it self-defense. Calls it complicated. Calls it unfortunate but necessary. The bureaucrats who maintain the spreadsheets have never seen the children. They work in offices in Jerusalem, in Washington, in humanitarian organizations that have learned to speak the language of “access restrictions” and “security concerns” and “complex operating environments.”
No one is giving orders to kill. That is not how this works.
Instead, payments freeze. Waivers expire. Permits do not get approved. Shipments wait at crossings for inspections that take days or weeks. Aid organizations submit requests that go unanswered. Food sits in warehouses while people starve two miles away.
$383 million gets approved for food aid. Then the payments freeze. Organizations that already purchased supplies, medical equipment, wheat flour, medications for children with acute malnutrition, cannot afford to move them. The supplies exist. The children exist. The distance between them is bureaucratic.
$17.9 billion for weapons arrives on schedule.
This is the pattern I recognize. Not the spectacular violence, but the administrative kind. The kind that lets officials say they did not intend this, did not order it, simply followed procedure. The kind that fragments responsibility across so many departments that no one person can be held accountable for the dead child.
The kind that turns mass death into policy.
Meanwhile, aid workers try to reach the starving. 41 attempts to deliver food to the north. 41 denials or impediments. The bureaucrats cite security concerns, coordination failures, operational constraints. The spreadsheets justify the no.
On one day, a single day in this ongoing story, three separate strikes kill three aid workers: a Palestinian chef feeding hundreds, a Save the Children staff member, a World Central Kitchen employee. The number of humanitarian workers killed in this siege now exceeds 343.
The aid organizations announce they must pause operations. It is too dangerous, they say. As if the danger were accidental. As if it were not the point.
This is what bureaucratic elimination looks like. You do not announce genocidal intent. You create conditions incompatible with life, then blame those conditions for the deaths. You maintain plausible deniability at every level. You fragment the violence across so many decision points that no single person ordered the child to starve. They simply did not approve the permit, or did not release the funds, or cited security concerns, or followed protocol.
The system does what systems do when they decide certain populations are expendable. It builds elegant infrastructure to manage their elimination.
I know this because I watched it happen to my community. The AIDS crisis was not just virological. It was bureaucratic. People died because the FDA would not fast-track trials. Because insurance would not cover treatment. Because research funding went elsewhere. Because entire systems aligned, not through coordinated conspiracy but through structural indifference, to ensure certain deaths did not matter enough to prevent.
Reagan did not order anyone killed. He simply did not act. The system did the rest.
This is the story I am telling you. The one I recognize. The one that repeats.
I write this from inside the nation funding the siege. With citizenship that makes me complicit. Even my marginalized body carries the privilege of American distance from the bullets my taxes buy.
I am not writing from innocence.
I am writing from inside the machine as someone who knows what it means to be treated as expendable by the state and who is simultaneously complicit when it treats others the same way. I recognize the pattern because I have survived a version of it.
And I am still paying for the missiles.
In July, while watching this pattern unfold again, I tried to write about something safer. Something that would not cost me sleep or force me to reckon with my complicity.
But recognition does not wait for permission.
The poem broke down the door.
I am not Palestinian. I am not in Gaza. I am not her, the woman whose hunger I would attempt to describe, whose reaching I would attempt to witness. But I have hungered. I have carried survival in my body when systems wanted me to collapse. I have wrapped myself in whatever protection was available and felt it insufficient against the forces trying to unmake me.
I knew I had no right to speak for her. But I also knew what I was seeing.
I knew the machinery. I recognized the bureaucratic transformation of human beings into acceptable losses. I had been inside that calculation. And something in me refused to pretend I did not recognize it operating in Gaza.
So the witness, knowing his witness will not save anyone, tries anyway.
And so he writes.
He writes of a woman who exists, somewhere in the siege, carrying what cannot be carried. He has never met her. He will never meet her. If she reads his words, which she will not, cannot, and might never survive long enough to, she might not recognize herself in them. He is writing from a house with a full refrigerator, attempting to imagine hunger he has felt but not this hunger. Not starvation engineered by spreadsheet.
But he writes anyway because he recognizes something.
He recognizes how systems describe bodies they intend to eliminate. He has heard that language before, pointed at his own community. He knows what it sounds like when bureaucrats discuss your death as operational constraint, logistical challenge, unfortunate but necessary outcome.
He knows the mathematics of managed elimination.
So he writes a woman. Wrapping her hunger in cloth. Not modesty. Survival. To keep the ribs from rattling too loud. He writes the line, the crowd, the shoving that becomes prayer that becomes scream. He writes her children: one wrapped around her belly as if trying to stay unborn; one quieter since the bombing.
He writes the airdrop that lands deliberately out of reach. The boy who runs. The bullet that, and here he chooses a word carefully, corrects him. That verb matters. Corrects. As if the boy’s running were error and death were amendment. As if violence were grammar and the system were editing toward proper sense.
The parachute still flutters. White against a sky so blue it hurts to describe.
He writes: “They will call it tragedy. She calls it Tuesday.”
The line pleases him, briefly, before he recognizes what it is doing. It is making her suffering quotable. It is turning bureaucratic elimination into elegant phrasing. It is the moment witness risks becoming performance.
But he leaves it in. Because it is true. Because one of the horrors of living inside managed death is the repetition. The way catastrophe becomes routine. The way Tuesday looks like this when you have been deemed expendable.
He writes her carrying. Carrying. Carrying.
Three times. Each repetition building weight. Each return adding what cannot be spoken: the exhaustion, the impossibility, the refusal to stop even when stopping would be easier. She carries because giving up means both children die instead of maybe one surviving.
The witness knows something about carrying what wants to crush you.
He writes the final image: still reaching, long after her voice has gone.
And then he stops writing because there is nothing else to say that would not be exploitation.
I wrote this poem in July. Published it. Received the responses one receives when writing about Gaza. Some gratitude. Some fury. Accusations of speaking for people whose voices I was supposedly silencing by adding mine.
All of which might be true.
But here is what I knew then and know more clearly now. The poem did not save her. If she existed, and women like her certainly exist in Gaza, hundreds of them, thousands, my witness changed nothing about her circumstances. The aid still did not arrive. The siege continued. The spreadsheets kept calculating.
My poem was, at best, a record of recognition. At worst, extraction. Taking someone’s suffering and turning it into art that serves my need to feel like I am doing something.
That imperfect, implicated recognition is what this essay is about.
There Is a Woman in Gaza
In Gaza, a woman wraps her hunger in cloth—
not modesty, but to keep the ribs from rattling too loud as she walks.
There is a line, then a crowd, then the shoving becomes a prayer
and the prayer becomes a scream.
She is not serene. She is not silent. She is screaming.
Her throat is split with it.
She survives. With a child on her hip, a daughter—
arms wrapped around her belly like she’s still in the womb,
like she’s trying to stay unborn.
One inside her spine—
nine years old, and quieter since the bombing.
They push. They claw. They scream.
This is not a line. This is a verdict.
Who eats. Who doesn’t. Who bleeds trying.
The airdrop lands ten yards too far.
A boy runs. A bullet corrects him.
The parachute still flutters—
white against a sky so blue it insults.
They will call it tragedy. She calls it Tuesday.
There are no diamonds here, just gravel beneath the tongue,
and a memory of olives.
She ties her scarf tighter.
Tells the baby stories of bread as though taste could be inherited.
Tells the older one to stop watching the drones.
They blink like cruel stars.
She carries. She carries. She carries.
There is a woman in Gaza still reaching—
long after her voice has gone.
Here is what I need you to understand about recognition.
When you have been inside the machinery of bureaucratic dehumanization, when you have been the body they are calculating, the life they are measuring against budget constraints, the death they are managing through policy, you learn to see things others miss.
You learn to hear what is not being said.
When an administrator says “unfortunately, that is not covered under your plan,” you hear: we have decided your life is not worth this expense. When they say “we are working within existing frameworks,” you hear: the framework was designed to let you die. When they say “it is a complex situation with many stakeholders,” you hear: we have distributed responsibility so thoroughly that no one can be held accountable for your death.
This is not paranoia. This is pattern recognition.
You learn the texture of institutional violence. How it feels different from personal cruelty. An individual can hate you. Can want you dead. Can work actively toward your elimination. That is evil, but it is legible. You know where it is coming from. You can name it.
Bureaucratic violence is harder to see because it does not require anyone to hate you.
It only requires systems that have already decided, often long before you entered the room, often by people who will never see your face, that your life is worth less than the cost of saving it. And then those systems operate exactly as designed.
The cruelty is structural, not personal. Which makes it more efficient. More sustainable. Easier to justify.
Let me show you how the machinery works.
Fragment the decision across multiple actors and create distance from the consequence. One person denies the permit. Another delays the shipment. A third cites security concerns. A fourth follows procurement protocol. A fifth enforces the budget constraint. The people who decide which aid gets approved never see the bodies. The soldiers at the checkpoint do not set policy. The policy-makers in Washington never smell the starvation. The bureaucrats in Jerusalem who calculate caloric minimums never hold the dying child.
Each person is doing their job. Following procedure. Operating within their authority.
The child starves anyway.
Deploy language that obscures. Do not say “starving children.” Say “food insecurity.” Do not say “killing civilians.” Say “collateral damage.” Do not say “genocide.” Say “complex humanitarian situation.” Do not say “we are deliberately restricting aid.” Say “we are working within operational constraints to ensure proper coordination.”
The language makes mass death sound like logistics.
This is how bureaucratic elimination works.
And I know this because I watched my community die this way.
During the AIDS crisis, no one in the Reagan administration said “let the faggots die.” They did not have to. They simply had to not act.
Do not fund research. Do not fast-track trials. Do not declare it a public health emergency. Do not speak about it publicly for years. Do not allocate resources. Do not change FDA protocols. Do not treat it as urgent.
Just do not.
The virus did what viruses do. But the deaths, the scale, the particular people who died, the speed at which they died, that was bureaucratic. That was policy. That was the system deciding that certain lives were not worth the cost of saving.
And everyone involved could say, and did say, that they had not killed anyone. They had simply followed existing frameworks. Worked within budget constraints. Operated according to protocol.
Meanwhile, we died. By the thousands. By the tens of thousands. While the government counted bodies and called it surveillance data.
I know what this looks like. I know what it sounds like. I know the specific ways institutions distance themselves from the deaths they cause.
So when I see reports from Gaza, aid approved then payments frozen, shipments blocked at crossings, $383 million allocated then withheld while organizations that already purchased supplies cannot afford to move them, I do not need anyone to explain the machinery to me.
I recognize it.
But here is where it gets complicated.
Recognition is not the same thing as solidarity. Solidarity implies a choice to stand with the oppressed. It implies you could choose otherwise. It positions you as ally, well-meaning perhaps, but fundamentally separate from the suffering you are witnessing.
Recognition is different. Recognition means: I have been inside a version of this machinery. I know its internal logic. I can see it operating elsewhere because I understand how it works.
This is not about choosing to care. This is about knowing.
And knowing does not exempt me from complicity.
I recognize bureaucratic elimination in Gaza because I have survived it in America. But my American citizenship funds the elimination I am recognizing. My taxes buy the missiles. My government maintains the siege. My country provides the political cover.
Even my marginalized body carries the privilege of American distance from the violence it funds.
So what does recognition mean when you are implicated in the thing you recognize?
This is not the same moral position as privileged guilt. Privileged guilt says: I benefit from systems that harm others, and I feel bad about it. That is real, but it is different.
I am saying: I have been harmed by systems that decide which lives matter. I know intimately what that harm feels like. And I am simultaneously participating in those same systems when they decide Palestinian lives do not matter.
I know what it means to be hunted by power. And I am still somehow protected by it when it hunts others.
That is not guilt. That is contradiction. And it does not resolve.
So the witness sits with his poem. His act of recognition. His attempt to say: I see you. I know this machinery. I refuse to pretend I do not recognize it.
But what does that recognition do?
It does not stop the siege. It does not deliver the aid. It does not save the woman, if she exists, if she is still alive, if his description bore any resemblance to her reality. His witness changes nothing about her material circumstances.
At best, his writing is a record. Evidence that some people saw and refused to look away. A marker that says this happened, and it was witnessed, and the witness knew enough to recognize it as elimination rather than tragedy.
At worst, it is extraction. Taking someone’s suffering and turning it into art. Using her hunger to demonstrate his moral sensitivity. Performing witness as substitute for action.
Probably, it is both.
But here is what the witness also knows: silence would have been worse.
Not because his voice matters more than hers. It does not. Not because his witness saves anyone. It will not. But because he knows what silence does when you recognize what you are seeing.
Silence becomes participation.
When you know how bureaucratic elimination works, when you can see the machinery operating, can recognize the pattern, can hear what is not being said in the official language, then silence is a choice to let the machinery continue without even the minimal friction of witness.
This does not make witness sufficient. It does not make it clean. It does not absolve the witness of complicity.
But it makes silence impossible.
This is what survival teaches you. How to read systems that want you dead. How to see through the official explanations. How to recognize when you are being managed toward elimination rather than supported toward survival.
And once you know, once you have developed that survival knowledge through lived experience, you cannot turn it off. You recognize the pattern everywhere it appears.
Which means I cannot watch Gaza and pretend I do not understand exactly what is happening.
The aid that gets approved then frozen. The permits that do not get processed. The shipments that wait at crossings. The elegant spreadsheets calculating minimum calories. The fragmented responsibility that lets everyone claim they did not kill anyone.
I know this machinery. I have been processed by it.
And I am funding it.
Here is what the witness learns from studying the pattern.
America has always done this. It has always maintained elaborate systems for deciding which lives are expendable. It has always built bureaucratic infrastructure to manage elimination while maintaining plausible deniability.
Indigenous peoples. Enslaved Africans. Chinese railroad workers. Japanese Americans. Communists. Queers. People with AIDS. Iraqis. Afghans. Palestinians.
The specific populations change. The machinery stays the same.
And the machinery works precisely because it fragments responsibility, creates distance between decision and death, deploys obscuring language, and lets everyone involved claim they were simply following procedure.
No one person decides to commit genocide. The system calculates that certain deaths are acceptable costs, and then it operates accordingly.
This is what the witness recognizes. This is what his survival knowledge reveals.
America does not fund Gaza’s siege despite its values. It funds the siege because bureaucratic elimination is one of its core competencies. This is what the nation does. What it has always done. What it exports alongside democracy and human rights and all the other things it claims to stand for.
The witness knows this because he has been on the other side of American calculations about which lives matter.
And he is still here. Still funding the next calculation.
So what do you do when recognition is not enough but silence is impossible?
You write. Knowing it is inadequate. Knowing it might be extraction. Knowing it will not save anyone.
You write because the alternative, pretending you do not recognize what you are seeing, choosing comfort over witness, letting the machinery operate without even minimal friction, makes you complicit in a different way.
You write knowing that you are already complicit. That American citizenship makes you complicit. That your taxes fund the siege whether you speak or stay silent.
But speaking does not absolve you.
It simply refuses one particular form of participation: the pretense of not knowing.
You know. You have been inside the machinery. You recognize the pattern.
And that knowledge, inadequate and uncomfortable and unresolved, is what you offer.
Not as salvation. Not as substitute for action. Not as moral credential.
As evidence.
Evidence that some people saw. That recognition was possible. That the pattern was visible to those who had learned to see it.
That this happened.
Again.
It is Saturday, November 29, 2025, as I write this.
The siege continues. The ceasefire that briefly held in early 2025 collapsed. The administration approved $383 million for Gaza aid on January 31, then froze the payments. Aid organizations spent millions on supplies expecting USAID payment that never arrived. Medical supplies, food to treat acute malnutrition, lab equipment, all purchased, all waiting, unable to move because organizations cannot afford the cost.
Meanwhile, the United States spent at least 17.9 billion on military aid for Israel in the first year of the offensive.
The math remains clear. Billions for weapons arrive on schedule. Millions for food get approved then frozen.
The woman I wrote about in July, I do not know if she is alive. I do not know if she ever existed in the specific form I imagined. But women like her exist. Mothers calculating which child gets fed. People reaching for flour while the spreadsheets calculate acceptable losses.
343 humanitarian workers have been killed since October 7, 2023. The number keeps rising. The organizations pause operations, citing danger, as if the danger were accidental.
And I am still here. In my house with the full refrigerator. In the country that claims divine mandate while engineering starvation. In the citizenship that makes me complicit whether I speak or stay silent.
Still recognizing. Still writing. Still funding.
The witness understands by now that his essay will not stop anything.
The siege will continue after he finishes writing this sentence. The aid will remain blocked. The payments will stay frozen. The children will keep calculating the distance between hunger and bullets.
His poem changed nothing. This essay will change nothing. Recognition without action is simply another form of consumption, witnessing atrocity from safety, turning suffering into intellectual exercise, performing moral awareness as substitute for material intervention.
He knows this.
But he also knows what happens when people who recognize the pattern choose to look away.
He has watched it happen before. Watched people who understood exactly what the AIDS crisis was, who could see the bureaucratic machinery of managed death operating, decide it was too complicated, too controversial, too costly to speak about. Watched them choose comfort over witness. Choose careers over truth. Choose silence over the friction that witness creates.
And silence did not save them from complicity. It only made the complicity quieter.
The machinery kept operating. The deaths kept accumulating. And the silence became its own form of participation.
Here is what recognition has cost me.
Sleep. I wake up thinking about the children reaching for flour. The mothers calculating. The aid workers trying to deliver food through checkpoints designed to prevent delivery.
Relationships. People who find my position too complicated, too critical, too uncomfortable. People who want simpler narratives. People who want full-throated support for Israel or uncomplicated solidarity with Palestine.
The comfort of my own convictions. I cannot write this essay and feel righteous about it. I cannot position myself as the good man bearing witness to evil. I am complicit. My citizenship funds the siege. My witness is inadequate. My writing might be extraction.
All of that is true.
But looking away would cost more.
It would cost the person I can live with being. The one who recognizes patterns of bureaucratic dehumanization because he has survived them. The one who refuses to pretend he does not see what he sees, even when seeing implicates him.
That person cannot watch Gaza and stay silent.
Not because his voice matters more than others. Not because his witness saves anyone. But because recognition, when you have been inside the machinery, creates a specific responsibility.
The responsibility to refuse the pretense that this is complicated beyond understanding. To refuse the language that obscures. To refuse the fragmentation of responsibility that lets everyone claim they did not kill anyone.
To say: I know what this is. I have seen this machinery before. And it is operating again.
The witness knows what happens next.
The essay ends. He returns to his life. Makes dinner. Pays his taxes. Watches the news. Scrolls past images of Gaza between other content. Goes to work. Loves who he loves. Writes about other things.
The siege continues without him watching.
This is one of the specific horrors of bureaucratic violence. It does not need your attention. It operates whether you are looking or not. The spreadsheets keep calculating. The permits keep getting denied. The aid keeps waiting at crossings. The children keep starving.
Your witness changes nothing about the machinery’s operation.
But the witness also knows this. There will come a day, years from now or decades from now, when people ask how this was allowed to happen. How the siege continued for so long. How aid was blocked while children starved. How the international community watched genocide unfold in real time and did nothing.
And the answers will be the same answers that followed every other managed elimination.
We did not know. It was complicated. We were following procedure. We could not have known. No one person was responsible. We were just doing our jobs.
This essay is evidence against those future lies.
This happened. People knew. The pattern was visible. The machinery was recognizable. And we participated anyway.
Some spoke. Some stayed silent. But all of us living in America, paying American taxes, holding American citizenship, all of us funded it.
That is the truth this essay bears witness to.
Not as absolution. As record.
I do not know how to end this.
The traditional essay demands resolution. Some synthesis. Some conclusion. Some wisdom earned through the inquiry. But resolution would be obscene. There is no wisdom here. Only ongoing atrocity and ongoing complicity and the inadequate witness of someone who recognizes the pattern but cannot stop it.
The woman in Gaza, if she is still alive, if she exists, is still reaching.
The children are still calculating the distance between hunger and bullets.
The aid is still blocked.
The payments are still frozen.
The siege continues.
And I am still here, in the country that funds it, writing words that change nothing.
This is not enough. I know it is not enough.
But I also know what I know. I cannot unknow it. I cannot stop recognizing bureaucratic elimination when I see it. I cannot pretend I do not understand the machinery because I have been inside it.
So I write this. Knowing it is inadequate. Knowing it might be extraction. Knowing it will not save anyone.
I write because silence, the silence of someone who recognizes the pattern but chooses comfort over witness, would make me someone I cannot live with.
I write because she is still there.
Still reaching.
Long after I finish this sentence. Long after you finish reading it. Long after we both return to our lives and our comfort and our distance from the violence our citizenship funds.
She is still there.
And I cannot pretend I do not know what that reaching means.
Let that be enough—for now.
Though we both know it is not.
Author’s Note
I published the poem in July 2025. By November, when I sat down to write this essay, the question I could not answer was this:
What does it mean to recognize bureaucratic elimination because you have survived it, then watch yourself fund it elsewhere?
The poem received responses. Some gratitude. Some fury. Questions about whether I had the right to write it. Thanks for writing it. Accusations of speaking for Palestinians. Affirmation that witness matters even when inadequate.
All of which might be true.
But the poem could not hold the contradiction I needed to examine. That is what this essay is.
I am not asking for absolution. I am not claiming witness is sufficient.
I am saying: I know what this machinery looks like because I have been inside it. I recognize it operating in Gaza. And my citizenship funds it.
That knowledge makes silence impossible.
Since July, the siege has continued. The woman I wrote about, if she existed, if she is still alive, is still reaching.
This essay will not save her. It will not make me less complicit. But it refuses one specific form of complicity: the pretense of not knowing.
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You eloquently described what I have been unable to say for decades.
This is all so chilling - your poem, the pattern recognition, the cold bureaucratic calculations. There’s a lot to unpack in what you’ve written. Thank you for sharing this with us.