I’ve so far received campaign literature or text messages from seven of the candidates in the NJ-12 congressional race: Sue Altman, Brad Cohen, Adam Hamawy, Adrian Mapp, Verlina Reynolds-Jackson, Shanel Robinson, and Squire Servance. Of these, Hamawy is the only one who’s mentioned ending the Iran War as an explicit part of his pitch. The other six say nothing.

Try to get your mind around this evasion: six out of seven candidates in a Democratic primary don’t think that our being involved in the most irrational and ruinous war in decades is even worth mentioning. Aggression means nothing to them, even when committed by their supposed arch-enemy, Trump. Mass death means nothing to them. Regional war means nothing to them. The potential destruction of the entire oil infrastructure of the Persian Gulf means nothing to them. The potential for a ground invasion means nothing to them. The potential for nuclear war means nothing to them. The indefinite closure of the Strait of Hormuz means nothing to them. The blockade of the Persian Gulf means nothing to them. The recent increase in fuel prices means nothing, the prospect of inflation means nothing, and the expected downstream consequences of the closure and blockade mean nothing.

Likewise, the prospect of retaliation, whether official or “rogue”–means nothing to them. That we might get blown up, shot, or suffer cyberattacks for this war, are all just a bunch of sunk costs to them–sunk costs we should quietly accept, and indefinitely continue paying for. That the cyberattacks could wreck whole hospital systems or companies or industries, or dump tranches of personal information into the Cloud, is no big deal, either. That cyberattacks are doing it right now is no big deal to them. In an infernal irony, half of the candidates tout their military credentials to prove their competence and moral credibility for political office. Well, we lost all the wars these people served in. So what are they bragging about? Defeat?

There’s a song by the heavy metal band Static-X that perfectly captures our predicament: “The Trance Is the Motion.” A trance is a state of altered consciousness characterized by diminished awareness of one’s surroundings. If you convince yourself that the only “surroundings” that exist are the ones that immediately surround you, it becomes easy to enter a trance that deletes the entire world beyond you.

Hamawy aside, that’s what all of them have done: they’ve all hit Esc on reality. They keep talking, keep moving, keep acting, or seem to. But whether because they’re afraid to bring up the war or they’re literally oblivious to it, they’ve managed to induce a mental state in themselves that treats a major war and its consequences as a non-event and non-issue. I don’t know what’s worse: that this extended act of evasion mirrors that of their constituents, or that it’s encouraged those constituents to mirror their mentors. Either way, the trance has become the motion. And either way, our survival depends on breaking the spell.