One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

Allowed to wield silence so freely, any institution will become insatiable. It’s not only that the absence of information allows those complicit in but unaffected by wrongdoing to look away. The silence itself becomes an empty canvas, onto which any fantasy can be painted. When every last Palestinian journalist has been killed, maybe there will never have been any Palestinian journalists at all. Maybe they will have all been terrorists or supporters of terrorists

It’s no use, in the end, to scream again and again at the cold, cocooned center of power: I need you, just this once, to be the thing you pretend to be.

You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience.

Because sometimes the powerful commit or condone or bankroll acts of unspeakable evil, and any institution that prioritizes cashing the checks over calling out the evil is no longer an arts organization. It’s a reputation-laundering firm with a well-read board.

And sometimes that thing is so grotesque—what we do to one another so grotesque—that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty. Still, sit. Sit.

Elect us or else they will abolish abortion rights; elect us or they will put more migrants in concentration camps; elect us or they will make your lives so much worse. What is the use, once elected, of doing anything of substance when what was necessary, the negation of some other hypothetical outcome, has by definition already been achieved?

Look instead at the faces of those who watch from the sidelines. Often, what you’ll find is not an expression of proud support or the shock and horror all these people will claim to have felt much later, after the verdict is in. Rather, you’ll see a childish little smirk. It’s the smirk of someone who has come to realize the ugliness of the enterprise they have passively aligned with but cannot muster the courage to abandon now. The soul, what’s left of it, buckles under the weight of contradiction, and all one can do is hide behind that pained little smirk, the half-stance of the spineless, the chanting, with not quite enough conviction, of four more years, four more years, as the bodies pile up outside one’s door.

The system does not work for you, was never intended to work for you, but as an act of magnanimity on our part, you may choose the degree to which it works against you.

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.

So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting.

And yet, I know other people’s fear—as irrational as mine, more irrational than mine—buys everything. It moves armies, obliterates thousands. As with rage, there is an invisible force to fear, a gravity. I can no more push my fear upward into another echelon of privilege than those above me can help but let theirs fall, with terrible force, onto the lives of those below.

On the second weekend of February 2024, the decomposing body of five-year-old Hind Rajab, whom the Israeli military murdered, is found in a car with her family, next to a burned-out ambulance that was dispatched to rescue her. Later, an independent investigation will find 355 bullet holes in the car Hind was in. But early on, the story is reported in multiple media outlets as though it were a missing-person’s case, as though this child simply walked out of sight and then walked straight out of this life.

the word “radicalize” feels wrong, seems to imply an element of extremism, as though rage at this kind of blatant hypocrisy is the abnormal thing, when what is plainly abnormal is to accept it.

How does one finish the sentence: “It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but…”

In reality, what is happening is the opposite of an embrace. It’s a shoving aside of the present system, a system that makes it more and more clear there is no future, no community, for this or any other generation to come. Only endless taking—and if these young people must pay for it by forfeiting hope or possibility or clean air or a livable planet, so be it. A system more petulant and intransigent than any protester who ever lived. A system that can only ever say: There is nothing better than this.

rallying cry issued by the Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi: “Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. If it’s a handful, throw it. If it’s a fingernail full, scrape it out and throw. Get in the way however you can.”

A world that shrugs at one kind of slaughter has developed a terrible immunity. No atrocity is too great to shrug away now, the muscles of indifference having been sufficiently conditioned.

What purer expression of power than to say: I know. I know but will do nothing so long as this benefits me. Only later, when it ceases to benefit me, will I proclaim in great heaving sobs my grief that such a thing was ever allowed to happen. And you, all of you, even the dead in their graves, will indulge my obliviousness now and my repentance later because what affords me both is in the end not some finely honed argument of logic or moral primacy but the blunt barrel of a gun.