One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

One of the hallmarks of Western liberalism is an assumption, in hindsight, of virtuous resistance as the only polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism. While the terrible thing is happening—while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed—any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight.

It is this impulse, to give your child a fighting chance at privilege by immersing them in the myriad languages of the privileged world, that makes me who I am, that lands me in the American International School at age eight, writing thank-you letters to American soldiers. We are all governed by chance. We are all subjects of distance.

I watch an interview with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York. “I think, right now what is happening in Gaza, I can’t, I just, I can’t go on every single day seeing this,” she says. “I don’t associate myself with what’s happening.” I wonder what it must feel like. It must take great courage, to dissociate so fully, and under such difficult circumstances.

When a Muslim congressman goes on a morning show in 2015 and says Trump might win, he’s almost laughed off the set by the other pundits. When a Palestinian American congresswoman calls for Palestine to be free, she’s censured—her colleagues, however, are free to call for the eradication of Palestinians without consequence. Even candidates who are remotely like me are told by huge swaths of the United States, time and time again: You are not the same, the rules for you are not the same, what you have to say is lesser. No, I don’t want a candidate who’s the embodiment of me. I want a candidate who doesn’t bankroll genocide. Failing that, I want the superhuman powers of dissociation that even the Democratic Party’s progressive vanguard seem able, in a pinch, to conjure.

It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion.