Designing for Dignity

I just watched Straw and I wept.
Not because it was tragic, but because it was true. Straw is not just a film. It is
a slow, agonizing scream, one that echoes through our hospitals, our
classrooms, our customer care lines, and our offices.

It is one of the most emotionally charged indictments of modern society that I’ve ever seen, a quiet explosion of everything we politely ignore until it’s too
late.

This is not a movie about villains but about systems. About how ordinary, and well-intentioned people become broken by them, or worse, become
complicit in breaking others.

Let’s not forget, systems without empathy don’t just fail people, they deform them. And today, millions live in that deformation, crushed by outdated policies, exclusionary design, and leadership that overlooks their humanity.

Citizens cry out. Customers complain. They walk toward us in pain, but we don’t see them.

When we finally listen, we listen through bias.
We defend. We dismiss. Or we respond too late.

Our institutions are not blind by accident. They are tone-deaf by design. We’ve
built operating models where performance is measured by speed, not sensitivity. We pour billions into crisis management, but pennies into prevention.
We celebrate protocols while people perish under their weight.

Straw reminds us that injustice doesn’t always wear a uniform.
Sometimes, it wears a suit.
Sometimes, it issues a policy brief.
Sometimes, it smiles and says, “There’s nothing we can do.”

What begins as oversight soon calcifies into oppression.
What starts as apathy mutates into violence.
And what we call “systems” slowly become silencers, blunting the voices they were meant to serve.

One of the hardest truths this film forces us to confront is that neutrality is
not noble. In a broken world, neutrality is alignment with the dominant
narrative.

Unfortunately, any policy, process, or platform that lacks empathy will eventually cost more than it saves. Because you will pay for what you refuse to feel: pay in
protests, burnout, violence,  mental health breakdowns, and collapsed public trust. Pay in the monsters we create when people are ignored for too long.

Janiyah Wiltkinson is not fiction; she is everywhere. Her story echoes in the lives of millions whose downward spiral isn’t caused by weakness, but by systems never meant to protect them.

She’s the patient turned away for lacking money. The student excluded because her zip code doesn’t fit the blueprint.
She is the voice we ignore. The face we overlook. The life we fail to defend.

This film reminded me to defer judgment, to unlearn my biases, to interrogate my comfort, and to never mistake procedure for justice. It taught me that empathy is not a soft skill but the infrastructure for lasting change.

As leaders, let’s stop upholding systems that break the very people they were meant to protect.