One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

The fear of some comfort disappearing collides with a different fear—a fear that any society whose functioning demands one ignore carnage of this scale for the sake of artificial normalcy is by definition sociopathic.

Power absent ethics rests on an unshakable ability and desire to punish active resistance—to beat and arrest and try to ruin the lives of people who block freeways and set up encampments and confront lawmakers. But such power has no idea what to do against negative resistance, against someone who refuses to buy or attend or align, who simply says: I will not be part of this. Against the one who walks away.

In the midst of the world’s first livestreamed genocide, when plain before the eyes of anyone who cares to look are shown the most visceral details, one of the few things that inspires any real panic on the part of most Western power centers is the prospect of reduced shipping activity through the Red Sea.

Once, in Portland, I was invited to an awards ceremony honoring local businesses. One company received an award for—I forget now: trailblazing? synergy? something, on account of completing a particularly difficult job in Israel. The company was a labor middleman, it specialized in getting other corporations the workers they needed, and in this case, at the last minute, the owners of a manufacturing plant decided that no Palestinians would be allowed to work there. So the labor supplier scrambled, but managed to source the workers from somewhere in Eastern Europe. For this, they were being presented with an award that night in Portland. The whole room applauded.

Perhaps that is what this all comes to, in the end, some pathetic adherence to the idea that certain peoples simply need to be crushed. But whoever subscribes to this idea should at least have the spine to embrace it. To look upon the body of the little girl hanging from the wall, limbs severed by the force of the blast, and say: I’m fine with this, I am this. At least there’d be some measure of honesty in it.

To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice but not others by someone who doesn’t care about any of them is to be told, simply, to keep quiet.

Success, growth, profit came from taking what might at one time have been decent, stable jobs and rebranding them as side hustles. The brilliant business idea was persuading people to expect less.

In the final moments of Aaron Bushnell’s life, officers rush to the site of his burning. One asks for a fire extinguisher, another points his gun at the flames.