Mouse

“Active resistance – showing up to protests and speaking out and working to make change even at the smallest levels, the school boards and town councils – matters. Negative resistance – refusing to participate when the act of participation falls below one’s moral threshold – matters. And yet there are days when both negative and active resistance feel pointless. A political system that won’t restrict firearms even after a shooter massacres classrooms full of children, a system that shrugs when a regime murders and dismembers a journalist because that regime controls an inordinate amount of oil, a system that won’t flinch at the images of starving babies when it has the power to save their lives – what manner of resistance can’t such a system learn to abide? What use is any of it, what use?

But there is a use, always. The first is outward: every derailment of normalcy matters when what’s becoming normal is a genocide. It doesn’t take much: by the standards of Western normalcy, where the possibility of a missile landing on one’s / house or a military sniper murdering one’s children is so implausible as to be indistinguishable from science fiction, even minimal incontinence is tantamount to apocalypse. The second is inward: every small act of resistance trains the muscle used to do it, in much the same way that turning one’s eyes from the horror strengthens that particular muscle, readies it to ignore even greater horror to come. One builds the muscle by walking away from the most minor things – trivial consumables, the cultural work of monsters, the myriad material fruits grown on stolen ground – and realizes in the doing of these things that there is a wide spectrum of negative resistance. 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. (p. 166-167)”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“When the Israeli military opens fire on starving civilians clambering for flour, The Guardian describes the killings as "food aid related deaths." One struggles to imagine how food aid could do such a thing.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“One day it will be considered unacceptable, in the polite liberal circles of the West, not to acknowledge all the innocent people killed in that long-ago unpleasantness. The truth and reconciliation committees are coming. The land acknowledgements are coming. The very sorry descendants are coming...One day the social currency of liberalism will accept as legal tender the suffering of those they previously smothered in silence, turned away from in disgust as one does carrion on the roadside. Far enough gone, the systemic murder of a people will become safe enough to fit on a lawn sign. There's always room on a liberal's lawn.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“(at Guantanamo) Whatever crimes they might have been accused of...if they didn't hate the west before decades of their life were taken from them, mustn't they hate it now? What is the statute of limitations on resentment? On rage? On revenge?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This