One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

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.

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

Waiting on a Western judicial institution to cast judgment on a

killing spree financed and endorsed by the West means, inevitably, watching a disjointed ballet of impossible reconciling.

could one day be inflicted on them, they’d tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.

but believes it to be absolutely justified, absolutely necessary. I know this face, too. It appears on talk shows and atop opinion pieces stating, euphemistically or not, that the same world in which you can buy avocados all year round and your iPhone keeps getting more powerful and you never have to live in fear of an occupying force obliterating your family with missiles is the world in which an insignificant group of people you’ll never meet simply have to die.