One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

There will be more moments of terror, both state-sanctioned and coldly, brutally individual. Only some of these acts will be formally labeled terror, though, because in the hierarchy of the Western world—of the world entire—revenge is a carefully delineated thing, around which whole histories and peoples must be ordered to make certain violence regrettable but understandable and other violence savage and infinitely punishable. But none of this changes the reality that revenge has always been a universal resource. When the state enacts it, it will be deemed proportional and measured. When the individual does, it will mark a brand-new starting point of history and everyone who looks or sounds or in any way resembles the author of that violence will be commanded in perpetuity to condemn it, knowing full well no amount of condemnation will ever be enough. One day there will be no more looking away. Looking away from climate disaster, from the last rabid takings of extractive capitalism, from the killing of the newly stateless. One day it will become impossible to accept the assurances of the same moderates who say with great conviction: Yes the air has turned sour and yes the storms have grown beyond categorization and yes the fires and the floods have made of life a wild careen from one disaster to the next and yes millions die from the heat alone and entire species are swept into extinction daily and the colonized are driven from their land and the refugees die in droves on ...