One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

Maybe it’s not all that much trouble to avoid ordering coffee and downloading apps and buying chocolate-flavored hummus from companies that abide slaughter. It is this realization that renders negative resistance most terrifying to political and economic power—the simple fact that, having taken these small steps, a person might decide it was no great sacrifice, and might be willing to sacrifice more, demand more. That having called for justice in one instance, one might do it again and again, might call for a just world. It is probably the case that most mainstream Western politicians don’t actually care one iota about Israelis or Palestinians and, were the calculus of electoral self-interest to shift, would happily back whatever position serves their own interests best. But what about a population whose inability to countenance genocide spreads outward, becomes an inability to countenance what the same political systems do and will always allow to happen to so much of the planet in the name of endless extraction, endless more? Such a thing puts the entire ordering at risk.