One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

soon caused no reaction at all. It was just what happened to certain places, to certain people: they became balls of pale white light. What mattered was, it wasn’t us.

It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.

Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.

Know your place. It’s a frequent, nauseating political inheritance: come to experience the world under the reign of someone who thinks of you as subhuman, as undeserving of a future, and an ugly impression is settled that true power is the ability to do the same to someone else.