Fight against the theft of your soul
13 May 2025, late afternoon
There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they’ll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they’d tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.
No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. 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. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness. Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.
I finished reading One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar El Akkad last night. The book is incredible. I was reminded a lot of Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. The main difference is we are living through the events of Omar’s book. Omar uses death and destruction in Gaza to frame his scathing criticisms of the West. Things have gotten worse, not better in Gaza. The world watches, as it always seems to, as genocide unfolds once again. It’s refreshing to read someone speak clearly about what is happening, what your eyes and ears lay witness too, while politicians or the media tell you what you understand to be true is not. It is frustrating and depressing to see how cyclical everything seems to be. These are dark days.