One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

Fear obscures the necessity of its causing. No one has ever been unjustifiably afraid, not in their own mind.

My fear, on account of who I am and what place I occupy in the West, buys me nothing. Less than nothing—the majority response I expect from admitting my wariness of large American flags on the backs of pickup trucks isn’t some nuanced discussion about the fermentable nature of patriotism, but rather the insinuation that this isn’t fear at all, but hatred, ungratefulness: Well, leave, then. You don’t like it? Leave. My fear buys nothing. I expect it to buy nothing. In this case, I want it to buy nothing—who cares how I feel about flags? 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.

But these deaths are of something foreign, and so cannot be the subject of fear. Such things can be discussed in terms of strategy—Will the wholesale murder of tens of thousands of kids prove a tactical blunder? Is the child who had to bury every member of his family now a future threat? Will Hamas benefit?—but the violence that might otherwise inspire true fear is ultimately happening to an insect, and what fool gives credence to an insect’s thoughts on its own swatting?