We Are But Small Trees

Gael MacLean
Apr 19
16 min read

Notes on evil, ordinary hands, and what we owe the children

Thatched huts in a refugee camp seen through a barbed wire fence. — Refugee Camp -Thai-Burma Border - ©Gael MacLean

The Farmer

He was trying to get comfortable. That’s what I remember first—not the story, not the camp, not the heat or the smell of cook-fires and diesel. The way he kept shifting his weight, adjusting the space where his left leg used to be. A landmine had taken it. He’d come home from the fields one afternoon and found what was left of his life.

Saw Lah Per was a farmer from Burma. Karen. A man who grew rice and loved his sister. I was on the Thai-Burma border, making a documentary for an NGO, working in refugee camps that had become, for their residents, permanent addresses. The kind of places the world builds when it doesn’t want to look at what it’s done.

His sister had been taken by soldiers of the military junta. Gang-raped. They broke her arms and her legs and threw her in the river to drown.

I’m going to let that sentence sit there. I’m not going to soften it with context or analysis or the careful language of human rights reports. A woman was broken and thrown in a river by men in uniform. That happened. It happens.

I asked Saw Lah Per how he carries on. One leg, stuck in a camp, no prospect of return, the image of his sister’s body in the water living behind his eyes every single day.

We do it for the children.

And then he said something I have carried with me ever since, turning it over like a stone in my hand:

We are but small trees, and our children grow up under the shadow of a big tree.

A farmer with one leg, in a rectangle of packed earth, giving me the architecture of everything. The big tree—the regime, the machinery, the organized cruelty that casts its shadow across whole nations. The small trees—the ordinary people growing beneath it, doing what they can, which is never enough and is everything. And the children, growing up in whatever light filters through.

I’ve spent years trying to understand evil. Saw Lah Per explained it to me in two sentences, and I’m only now catching up.

The Shadow of the Big Tree

Where does it come from?

Not evil as abstraction, not the philosophy seminar version. The specific, operational evil that sends soldiers to a farmer’s house to do what they did to his sister. The evil that is not passion or madness but procedure. Orders followed. Logistics arranged. Trucks dispatched.

We want evil to be alien. We want it to arrive from outside—a foreign pathology, a failure of civilization, something that happens over there to people who are not like us. We want the people who do these things to be monsters, because monsters are a different species, and if they’re a different species then we are safe.

But they’re not. They are us. That’s the part we can’t metabolize.

The soldiers who destroyed Saw Lah Per’s sister went home afterward. They ate dinner. Some of them had children of their own. They slept, and in the morning they did it again, or they didn’t, and either way the sky didn’t fall. The world absorbed what they’d done without breaking.

That’s the thing about evil. It doesn’t require the world to break. It only requires the world to look away.

The big tree doesn’t fall on you all at once. It grows. It puts out one branch, then another. Its shadow lengthens so gradually you don’t notice the light leaving until you’re standing in the dark.

The Conversion

I was in Romania before it joined the EU. The bullet holes were still in the buildings. You could trace the history of the revolution in pockmarked concrete — which walls had been fired on, which corners had been killing grounds. The physical scars were legible. The other kind were harder to read. It was still a land of averted gazes.

People told me things quietly, as if the walls still had ears. Maybe they did. Decades under Ceaușescu had taught them that any surface could be listening — because for decades, any surface was.

The Securitate had built one of the most comprehensive surveillance networks in history. Not through technology — through people. Neighbors informed on neighbors. Colleagues informed on colleagues. The regime rewarded those who reported disloyalty and blackmailed those who resisted — including children, pressured to report what their parents said at the dinner table. The intimate space of the family, the last place you might speak freely, became another room the state could enter.

What I heard, again and again, was the story of what this did to them. Not the country’s transformation — theirs. How they had learned to be afraid of everyone, including the people they loved.

You never knew, one man told me. He was describing people he’d known his whole life. People whose weddings he’d attended, whose children had played with his children. Anyone could be reporting. Your friend, your brother, your child’s teacher. So you stopped talking. And after a while, you stopped thinking. Because even your thoughts didn’t feel safe.

The people who were turned in disappeared into interrogation rooms, into prisons, into silence. Some came back different. Some didn’t come back. Everyone knew this, and no one said it aloud, and that silence was the point. You didn’t need to see what happened behind those doors. You just needed to know the doors existed.

This is the part that matters: he didn’t say the regime forced him to stop trusting. He said the regime made it dangerous to trust, and he made the calculation. There’s a difference. One implies a victim. The other implies a participant — someone who weighed the cost of courage against the cost of silence and chose to survive. Not because he was weak. Because the architecture of fear was designed to make that choice feel rational.

The conversion isn’t dramatic. It’s daily, repetitive, almost boring in its mechanics. A police state doesn’t need to convince you your neighbor is evil. It just needs to make you uncertain. It needs you to hesitate before you speak, to edit yourself at the dinner table, to feel a small pulse of fear when someone asks what you really think. After long enough, the hesitation becomes the habit, and the habit becomes who you are, and you can’t remember what it felt like to say what you meant without calculating the cost.

First they make you afraid of your neighbor. Then afraid for your children. Then afraid of your own voice. And one day you realize you’ve been living in a silence so complete it sounds like consent.

The shadow of the big tree, falling over a whole country. And beneath it, small trees bending toward the dark.

The Pattern

In Rwanda, the conversion took weeks. RTLM—Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines—broadcast instructions between pop songs. Cut the tall trees. Even the language was arboreal. As if the Tutsi were a species to be cleared, a forest to be felled. As if killing were agriculture.

I was working with a documentary film crew shortly after they returned. They had gone to Rwanda to shoot gorillas. Instead they listened to shooting and screaming for days. It changed them in ways they couldn’t articulate, and didn’t try to.

Teachers killed students. Priests locked their congregations inside churches and let the machetes in. Eight hundred thousand people in a hundred days. Five per minute. Every single one of those deaths was specific. A specific hand holding a specific machete. A specific moment of choice.

This is the pattern, and the pattern predates radio. The yellow stars. The identity cards. The census that asks about religion or ethnicity or tribe. The bureaucratic machinery of labeling that makes the unthinkable thinkable. First you name them. Then you separate them. Then you can do whatever you want to them—because them is not us. Them is a category.

And alongside the killing, always, the looking away.

For years—not months, years—the world looked away while millions were transported to camps to die during the Holocaust. The intelligence existed. The reports were filed. Refugees boarded ships and were turned back at port after port—the St. Louis with its nine hundred passengers, sent back to Europe, back toward the machinery that would consume a third of them. Quotas were maintained. Borders were enforced. Paperwork was processed with the same bureaucratic calm that processed the trains.

I had a neighbor once, an elderly Jewish woman. She had survived the camp. Every day for years she went up and down the alleys salvaging clothes and items from the garbage bins. Then she spent her nights cleaning everything. Her apartment was packed floor to ceiling. I asked her what she was collecting everything for. She said she had to keep busy so she couldn’t hear the screams of the people as they were murdered.

Rwanda happened while the world watched. Not metaphorically—literally. Journalists, UN observers, intelligence briefings. The word genocide was specifically avoided in official communications because to name it would have required action. So they called it acts of genocide—a grammatical evasion that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Burma happened while the world watched. The Rohingya, the Kachin, the Karen, the Shan—entire peoples systematically brutalized while the international community issued statements of concern and adjusted their investment portfolios.

Saw Lah Per’s sister was thrown in a river. No cameras. No outcry. A woman’s body in the water, and the current carried her away.

The pattern repeats because the pattern works. The big tree casts its shadow, and next door, a second tree grows—the bystander’s tree. The comfortable canopy of reasonable distance. Where we can hear the screaming if we listen, but the leaves are thick enough that we can choose not to.

The turning away is not neutral. It is the shadow’s other name.

The Not-Blinking

A president of the United States threatened, on camera, to bomb a civilization back to the Stone Age. He said it the way you might say you’re thinking of remodeling the kitchen. By dinner, the news cycle had moved on.

No one blinked.

I need to say that again. A head of state articulated, in plain language, the erasure of a civilization. The annihilation of a people, their history, their architecture, their children, their future. And the world absorbed it the way a river absorbs a body. Silently. Completely.

This is what the big tree looks like when it’s fully grown. Not the machete, not the propaganda radio, not the soldiers at the door. Those are the branches. The trunk is this: the moment when the unthinkable is said aloud and the world does not stop. When language that would have ended a career, ended a presidency, ended a political movement ten years ago is now just Tuesday. Just the weather. Just how things are.

How much airtime did the children get? The ones in Gaza, in Lebanon, the university students in Iran? How many minutes between the car commercial and the pharmaceutical ad? How many seconds before the anchor’s face reset to neutral and the next story began?

The killing is still going on. I want to write that in a font large enough to fill the page. The killing is still going on. While we discuss it in the past tense, while we debate its terminology, while we argue about whether it meets the legal definition of this or that—the grammatical evasions, again, always the grammatical evasions—children are being pulled from rubble. Right now. As you read this.

And we have learned, in real time, how much the world can absorb without breaking. The answer is: almost everything. The world’s capacity for absorption is the big tree’s greatest asset. Not the violence itself but the tolerance for it. The scrolling past. The reasonable distance. The thick walls of the house next door.

The ships turned back from port in 1939. The word genocide was avoided in 1994. The cameras roll and the rubble falls and the children are pulled out gray with dust in 2024. The technology changes. The turning away doesn’t.

This is worse than looking away. This is looking directly at it and continuing to eat your dinner.

The Ancient Machine

There’s a Buddhist concept called prapañca—conceptual proliferation. The mind takes a simple perception and elaborates it into a story, a judgment, an identity. You see a face; your mind generates other. You hear a name; your mind generates threat. The elaboration happens below awareness. By the time you notice, the label has already replaced the person.

Every wisdom tradition has tried to warn us about this. The warnings have been there for millennia. We carved them into stone, wrote them into scripture, built entire civilizations around the principle that the other person is also a person.

It has never been enough.

Because the machinery is not a flaw. It’s a feature. The same cognitive architecture that lets us function in complex societies—trust authority, follow norms, sort the world into manageable categories—is exactly what gets weaponized. The brain that learned to quickly identify friend from foe on the savannah is the brain that can be taught to see a neighbor as a threat. That can watch children pulled from rubble and change the channel.

The propaganda doesn’t create something new in us. It activates something old.

Which means the vulnerability isn’t aberrant. It’s structural. It’s in all of us. The distance between the person you are today and the person who could look away—or worse—is not as great as you need it to be.

The Romanian man who learned to fear his neighbors wasn't weak. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t uniquely susceptible. He was a person living under a big tree, and the shadow got into him the way shadows do: slowly, and then all at once.

And you? What shadow are you standing in right now, so accustomed to the dark you’ve forgotten what direct light feels like?

A large group of refugee huts on a hillside. — Refugee Camp - Thai-Burma Border - ©Gael MacLean

Buried Under a Tree

Along the Thai-Burma border I met another Karen, a woman who worked with the Karen Women’s Organization. She was fifty-three. She had been a refugee her entire life.

I was a refugee since I was in my mother’s womb, she told me. Her mother was a nurse who tended wounded resistance fighters while pregnant. When the soldiers came, her mother fled into the jungle in the rainy season and buried her newborn under a tree at night.

Under a tree. I didn’t say anything. I let the image sit.

She told me about the women arriving in camps from the 2006 offensive. Seventy percent of those who suffered were women and children. She described a woman who delivered twins in the jungle while fleeing—but couldn’t stop moving, and one of the babies dropped out, and after two or three days it died. When the mother reached camp there was only one baby left. She described a fourteen-year-old girl, disabled, alone in her house because her parents were in the fields. At 8:45 in the morning, a soldier raped her. She told me this with the specificity of someone who has made documentation a form of resistance—the time, the age, the circumstances. Each detail a refusal to let it become abstraction.

She ran safe houses for refugee women fleeing domestic violence. Literacy programs. Nursery programs. Leadership schools for young women. Income generation through weaving—she distributed thread, collected the finished cloth, sold it, returned the wages. The whole apparatus of keeping people alive and capable and seen, built from nothing, in a camp the world had forgotten.

And then, at the end, she said this:

What is peace, what is democracy, I don’t understand still today. I try to read the explanation but still can’t feel it today. I really want to feel it and experience peace and democracy right now, but I don’t have.

A woman who has been a refugee since the womb. Who has never once, in fifty-three years, experienced the thing she is fighting for. Who cannot even feel the concept she has organized her entire life around. And who gets up every morning and does the work anyway.

She was not defeated by this. She was not bitter. She was precise, and tired, and continuing.

This is what a small tree looks like. Not heroic. Not transcendent. Ordinary and persistent and rooted in a place no one would choose. Her mother buried her under a tree, and she grew up to become one.

And still today the atrocities in Burma continue.

A Series of Choices

I used to wonder what fails in a person. What breaks inside the soldier, the bureaucrat, the neighbor who picks up the machete. I imagined some essential human mechanism—empathy, conscience, the recognition of shared humanity—snapping under pressure.

I don’t think that anymore.

Nothing fails. Everything works. That’s the horror.

The obedience works. The group identity works. The moral delegation—I was following orders, everyone was doing it, what could one person do?—works. The taxonomy that replaces a face with a category works. Each small choice makes the next one easier. Each micro-permission opens a door that didn’t exist yesterday. And at the end of the corridor is the unthinkable, and it feels like common sense.

This is not a failure of humanity. It’s a success of ordinary human processes directed toward inhuman ends.

We are making these choices right now. Not in some dramatic, cinematic way—not the soldier at the door, not the hand on the machete. In the small, survivable, forgettable way. The headline we scroll past. The conversation we don’t have. The language we let slide because correcting it would be awkward, because the dinner party would get uncomfortable, because we are tired and the world is loud and surely someone else will say something.

The tree does not force anyone to sit in its shade. It simply grows, and the shade becomes the world you live in, and after a while you forget there was ever direct light.

The threat to bomb a civilization back to the Stone Age was a choice. The not-blinking was a choice. The news anchor’s reset face was a choice. Your silence, right now, about what you know is happening—that’s a choice too.

I’m not exempting myself. I’m writing this essay instead of doing something about it. And I know the difference.

What Didn’t Break

So here’s the question that haunts me more than where evil comes from.

Why didn’t Saw Lah Per become it?

He had every justification. His sister was destroyed in a way that language can barely hold.

His body was destroyed. His life was reduced to a rectangle of packed earth in a camp that smelled of cooking oil and despair. If anyone had earned the right to rage, to hatred, to the complete abandonment of moral reality, it was him.

And instead: we do it for the children.

We are but small trees.

He knew he was small. He said so. He wasn’t claiming heroism or moral superiority or some spiritual attainment that elevated him above his suffering. He was a small tree. One leg. A camp. The memory of the river. Small.

But small trees still grow. Small trees still shelter what’s beneath them. And Saw Lah Per had decided—not once, in some dramatic moment of epiphany, but every single morning, opening his eyes in that camp—that his shade would fall on the children. Not just his children. All children. The ones in the camp. The ones who would come after. The ones he would never meet.

The Karen woman who runs safe houses decided the same thing. Not once. Every morning. For fifty-three years, in a life that has never once contained the thing she’s working toward.

Evil is easy. It follows the path of least resistance—the ancient cognitive shortcuts, the submission to authority, the relief of having someone to blame. To hate the people who destroyed your life requires no effort at all. The story writes itself.

But to sit in a refugee camp with one leg and orient your remaining life toward the well-being of children you may never see grow up—to have been a refugee since the womb and still build safe houses and schools from nothing—that requires something I don’t have a word for. It’s not forgiveness. Neither of them said they forgave. It’s not transcendence—they weren’t above their suffering; they were inside it, fully, every day. It’s more like a refusal. A refusal to let what was done become the final word. A refusal to let the big tree be the only tree.

The soldiers saw Saw Lah Per’s sister as a category—enemy, target, object. The soldiers saw the fourteen-year-old girl as available. Saw Lah Per and the woman who was buried under a tree refused to return the gesture. Not because they were saints. Because they understood, in their bodies, what it costs when human beings become abstractions.

The Reversal

Evil and live are the same letters. I’ve been staring at that for weeks, the way I’ve been staring at Saw Lah Per’s sentence, and I can’t decide if it’s a coincidence or a koan.

Same material. Same human apparatus. Same ancient brain capable of extraordinary cruelty and extraordinary care. The direction is the only difference. The choice of which way you face.

The soldiers who took Saw Lah Per’s sister chose one direction. He chose the other. The Romanian man who learned to see friends as threats chose one direction. The neighbor who, after the revolution, had to learn to see faces again chose the other. The president who threatened to bomb a civilization chose one direction. The doctor pulling a child from rubble chose the other.

Same species. Same small, survivable, daily moments of turning one way or the other.

And live, if you hold it loosely enough, contains one more instruction: let live.

That’s the whole of it. The entire moral architecture. Not a commandment from on high, not a philosophical framework, not a spiritual attainment. Just the willingness to let another person continue to exist. To let the farmer farm. To let the weaver weave. To let the child grow up.

It should be the simplest thing in the world. That it isn’t—that we have to build entire civilizations, entire religions, entire legal systems around the principle of letting each other live—tells you everything about the shadow we’re standing in.

Small Trees

I don’t have an answer. I want to be honest about that.

The essay is supposed to arrive somewhere. The reader is supposed to be given something to carry—a framework, a practice, a way forward. But I’ve been sitting with this material for weeks, and the more I sit with it, the less certain I become about anything except the facts: that the machinery exists, that it lives in us, that it is running right now, and that children are dying while we discuss it.

I know what Saw Lah Per would say. He already said it.

But I also know that his words, carried in my notebook for years, have not stopped a single bomb. Have not kept a single child alive. Have not closed a single camp. The most radical, clear-eyed moral statement I’ve ever heard, and it changed exactly nothing about the world that produced the need for it.

So what, then?

Maybe this: the big tree is always growing. It has been growing since before we had words for it, and it will keep growing after these words are forgotten. It grows because we let it. Because we water it with our silence, our scrolling, our reasonable distance. Because the shadow feels normal after long enough. Because looking directly at the sun is painful, and the shade is comfortable, and who are we to fight a tree.

But Saw Lah Per, with one leg, in a camp the world forgot, looked at the children and decided to grow anyway. Not to fight the big tree. Not to cut it down. Just to grow. To offer what shade he could. To insist, with his body and his days and his stubborn, broken, astonishing life, that the children mattered more than the shadow.

And a woman who was buried under a tree the night she was born has spent fifty-three years building shelter out of nothing. Not because she knows what peace feels like. Because the children in the camp need shade, and she is here, and she can weave.

They chose to live. And to let live. The simplest reversal. The hardest one.

I think about them when I read the news. When the not-blinking threatens to become my not-blinking too. When the absorption feels complete and the silence feels permanent and the machinery feels so vast that any single human gesture seems absurd.

A farmer. One leg. A plastic chair in the heat.

A woman. Fifty-three years. Thread distributed, cloth collected, wages returned.