Indeed, this is already the reality of countless civilians across the Middle East who are affected by the U.S. However, innocent, everyday Iranians will have to bear that burden. If conflict with Iran does transpire in the future, we will never have to worry about food shortages, electrical blackouts and the looming threat of violence and death. We are not the ones who are going to have to deal with the effects of war. It’s easy to make jokes about something that would most likely never affect us directly. The TikTok dances, photoshopped tweets and everything in between trivialize a potential war that could kill thousands of people and ruin millions of lives. However, for me, the memes lost their humor when I realized we were making light of a situation that threatens to push Iran and the United States towards armed conflict. I don’t want to completely fault those who find humor in these jokes, as comedy is a legitimate coping mechanism in times of stress or anxiety. Most have probably seen the internet filled with TikToks of people dancing with the caption “me dodging bullets in Iran” and photoshopped tweets of Donald Trump stating “military draft starts tomorrow.” Most visibly, the Generation Z community heralded the new year by flooding social media outlets with World War III and draft memes. In the United States, the domestic populace reacted in a different manner. In nearby Iraq, equal numbers of Iraqis stormed through Baghdad to protest the presence of U.S. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets of Tehran to mourn Suleimani. Political analysts were quick to highlight the significance of the United States killing the most powerful military leader in the Middle East, with some calling the attack “America’s most consequential strike this century.” Some reacted in a manner befitting the severity of this situation, which dramatically escalated tensions between Iran and the United States. He was widely seen as one of the most powerful figures in Iran - second only to Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Suleimani was head of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Forces, a military unit that oversees Iran’s foreign operations. 3, an American drone strike killed Qassim Suleimani, a prominent Iranian military general.
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