One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

What to do with someone who says: I will have no part of this, when the entire functionality of the system is dependent on active participation? Forced into this kind of space, power becomes enraged, and behaves accordingly. Legislators rush to pass bills outlawing boycotts, not only in obvious violation of the same freedoms those legislators are sworn to protect, but also a practical impossibility, this quest to stop people from not buying something. Terms like “economic terrorism” are tossed around by the same people who are quite happy to pull their donations from universities and literary festivals and anywhere that doesn’t sufficiently silence whatever voices they want silenced. University administrators express shock at the utter inappropriateness of students’ demands to cut ties with weapons makers and institutes complicit with occupation, and punish those students by withholding their degrees. The idea that walking away is childish and unproductive is predicated on the inability to imagine anything but a walking away from, never a walking away toward—never that there might exist another destination. The walking away is not nihilism, it’s not cynicism, it’s not doing nothing—it’s a form of engagement more honest, more soul-affirming, than anything the system was ever prepared to offer.