One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

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.

Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?

Once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen. But for now, it’s just so much safer to look away, to keep one’s head down, periodically checking on the balance of polite society to see if it is not too troublesome yet to state what to the conscience was never unclear.

Black population forced in chains to build it, severed from home such that, as James Baldwin said, every subsequent generation’s search for lineage arrives, inevitably, not at a nation or a community, but a bill of sale.

Just for a moment, for the greater good, cease to believe that this particular group of people, from whose experience we are already so safely distanced, are human.

In the earliest days, in the chaos that precedes systemic annihilation, it is not what the party deemed most malicious has actually done that matters, but rather what it is believed capable of doing.

It is a reminder that, in times like these, one remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart is that the former will gleefully sign their name on the side of the bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it.

The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.

This is the world we’ve created, a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be consumed.

Yes, the killing happens now, but there’ll be plenty of time later to write very moving stories about the shape and shade of the bones.

A world that shrugs at one kind of slaughter has developed a terrible immunity. No atrocity is too great to shrug away now, the muscles of indifference having been sufficiently conditioned.