It is February 14th. The shop windows in Tuzla are bleeding red. Plastic hearts, velvet boxes, inflated balloons, the commercial debris of "love" is everywhere.

We are told that today is the day to celebrate connection. We are told to buy the chocolate, book the dinner, and pretend that the greatest struggle we face is finding the right reservation.

It is the ultimate gaslight.

Because outside the window, the world is not falling in love, it is falling apart.

The psychopaths in the penthouse

We are living through a global seizure of sanity. It is not just my homeland of Bosnia, which is dissolving under the weight of ethno-nationalist greed and a constitution written by people who wanted us to fail. It is the whole world.

We are ruled by the clinically insane. I do not use that word lightly. I mean it as a biological fact, as diagnosis. We are governed by a class of men,here in the Balkans, in the West, in the East, who lack the specific organ required for humanity: the capacity to feel another person’s pain.

They are psychopaths. They play chess with famine. They draw borders with blood. They sign weapons deals with the same hand they use to wave at cameras. And today, on this day of "hearts," they are likely sitting in expensive rooms, eating expensive meals, completely immune to the fact that they are eating the future of their own children.

The violent act of "Normalcy"

The most terrifying part isn't what they are doing. It’s what we are doing.

We are pretending.

We wake up. We brush our teeth. We check the news and see a genocide livestreamed in high definition. We see our own country being sold off for scrap metal. We see the climate buckling and the infrastructure rotting. And then?

Then we go to work. We file the report. We buy the Valentine’s gift. We smile at the cashier.

This performance of "normalcy" is the most violent thing I do. It is a lobotomy I perform on myself every morning just to function. To live a "normal life" in 2026 requires a level of dissociation that should be classified as a mental illness. We are walking through a burning house, straightening the picture frames, and telling each other that the smoke is just a change in the weather.

The dissociation of the survivor

Maybe this is why I feel so tired at 42. It’s not the age. It’s the effort of holding up the sky while everyone else acts like it’s blue.

The system is systematically killing us, through inflation, through pollution, through war, through the deliberate dismantling of healthcare and education. They are stripping the meat from our bones. And yet, the social contract demands that we be polite about it.

We are expected to die quietly. We are expected to celebrate holidays in the waiting room of the apocalypse.

I look at the red balloons today and I don't see romance. I see a distraction. I see a shiny object dangled in front of a population that is too exhausted to revolt.

Love as a weapon, not a gift

But here is the twist. If we are ruled by psychopaths, by people incapable of love, then the act of loving becomes the only real rebellion left.

I don’t mean the Valentine’s Day version of love. I don’t mean the rom-com kind. That is easy.

I mean the gritty, desperate, furious love that makes you stand up when your legs are shaking. The love that makes me fight for Mohammed’s tuition even when the bank account is empty. The love that makes us care for a stray cat in a city bursting of luxury, but lack the humanity.

The psychopaths want us isolated. They want us cynical. They want us to believe that "dog eat dog" is the law of nature, because that is their nature.

So today, I am not celebrating their version of romance. I am celebrating the stubbornness of the human heart. I am celebrating the fact that despite their best efforts to turn us into zombies, we still feel the pain of a stranger. We still cry for children we have never met. We still break.

They haven't killed that part of us yet. And as long as we can feel the heartbreak, we are still dangerous to them.

Happy Valentine’s Day to the resistance. Because resistance is the deepest kind of love.