One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

We live in the woods in Oregon. Wine and hazelnut country, somewhere in that strange middle space past where progressive Portland ends but before Trump Country begins.

It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.

Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.

This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.

To maintain belief in what is commonly called the rules-based order requires a tolerance for disappointment.

Finally, we were brought back and taught the undeniable lesson of the exercise: left to their own devices, most human beings are useless at estimating time, distance, or space.

Against such hollow gesturing, even the most unhinged Republican will always be able to say: Look, these people have no interest in your suffering, only in empty gestures; I’ll do away with gestures, and make the right people suffer. It is an astoundingly effective technique,

Fight it, then. Propose something to meet the nature of the moment.

establishes the lowest of benchmarks: Want my vote? Be less monstrous than the monsters.

What ensures it won’t be this way forever? Either hundreds of millions of people have always been predisposed to the lure of the fascist, in which case the entire democratic endeavor is doomed anyway, or something of corporate liberalism has brought us here.

When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?

the cancellation marks one of the earliest instances of what would become a cascade of institutional gutlessness in the arts world.

When Anna Burns won the Booker Prize, she thanked her food bank. Our work is stolen to train the software of multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence companies run by people who believe art is a problem to be solved.

Hemingway’s Iceberg principle—the notion that the vast majority of what is known about a story should exist beneath the surface of that story, unseen. It’s one of the most well-worn pieces of writing advice, a close cousin of the directive “Show, don’t tell.”

He is armored in a baseness the other candidates simply don’t know how to wear. He understands what his opponents don’t—that the people who will decide this election have gone well past red meat. They want the body served up alive.

Within a few months, most every one of these party insiders will roll over, pledge fealty to a man they privately despise. There’s no avenue but him to power, and no principle worth holding on to in power’s stead.

remember when the fires came to Oregon. It was September 2020, just two days after the birth of our son. We sat in the living room with our bags packed, multiple air purifiers running. Through the windows, we couldn’t see thirty feet to the edge of the backyard. The sky had turned a deep, unnatural copper. A layer of ash covered everything. In Clackamas County, one of the hardest hit, entire towns were wiped off the face of the earth.

For about two years, my internal marker for where the ruined part of the county began was the scorched corpse of a pickup truck by the side of Highway 22, nothing left of it but the chassis, and from the remains of the bed, a huge Trump flag flying.

The political topography of Oregon isn’t all that different from a lot of the United States—venture outside the big cities and things take a hard right turn.

Republicanism, in its current form, proposes the exact opposite—treason trials for political opponents, the stripping away of any societal covenant, a war on expertise. In the right-wing vision of America, every societal interaction is an organ harvest, something vital snatched from the civic body, sold for one kind of profit or another. It’s a vision that produces an almost unmatched clarity in the base, an unmatched loyalty: Which side of this operation do you want to be on?

One day this will end. In liberation, in peace, or in eradication at a scale so overwhelming it resets history. It’ll end when sanctions pile up high enough, or the political cost of occupation and apartheid proves debilitating. When finally there is no other means of preserving self-interest but to act, the powerful will act. The same people who did the killing and financed the killing and justified the killing and turned away from the killing will congratulate themselves on doing the right thing. It is very important to do the right thing, eventually.

When the time comes to assign blame, most of those to blame will be long gone.

One day there will be no more looking away. Looking away from climate disaster, from the last rabid takings of extractive capitalism, from the killing of the newly stateless.

Yes the air has turned sour and yes the storms have grown beyond categorization and yes the fires and the floods have made of life a wild careen from one disaster to the next and yes millions die from the heat alone and entire species are swept into extinction daily and the colonized are driven from their land and the refugees die in droves on the borders of the unsated side of the planet and yes supply chains are beginning to come apart and yes soon enough it’ll come to our doorstep, even our doorstep in this last coddled bastion of the very civilized world, when one day we turn on the tap and nothing comes out and we visit the grocery store and the shelves are empty and we must finally face the reality of it as billions before us have been made to face the reality of it but until then, until that very last moment, it’s important to understand that this really is the best way of doing things.