One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

But then to see a group of U.S. veterans at a memorial for Aaron Bushnell, at the site of his protest; to see hundreds of thousands marching, taking ground outside the constituency offices of their elected officials; to watch even the normally anonymous executives of weapons manufacturers face both active and negative resistance, students protesting at the factories and dockworkers refusing to load the missiles onto the ships—to see these things is to know the sand is sticking to the teeth. The gears will grind to a halt one day, and the silence that waits then, for those who commended this killing and for those who said nothing, will be of a far more burrowing kind. It will take the form of grandchildren who, when the subject comes up, will pretend not to know how their grandparents behaved, will awkwardly try to talk about anything else. It will take the form of previous statements quietly deleted, previous opinions abandoned and replaced with shiny new ones about how, yes, it was such a terrible thing that happened. And finally, it will take the form of a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul. And there will be no words exchanged then, only a knowing.