contemplatelit

Even so, why can’t I do what others have done—ignore the obvious. Live a #normal life. It’s hard enough just to do that in this world.

-Lauren Olamina in Octavia E. Butler’s #Parable of the Sower

Favorite books this year:

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad
Dawn, Octavia E. Butler
Imago, Octavia E. Butler
Adulthood Rites, Octavia E. Butler
Red Rising, Pierce Brown
A People’s History of the United States: Highlights from the 20th Century, Howard Zinn

That’s the one I came here to post :)

None of this #evil was ever necessary.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that #courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in #solidarity than in annihilation.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

The #congresswoman who stood her ground in the face of censure, of constant vitriol, of her own colleagues’ indifference. The protesters who gave up their #privilege, their jobs, who risked something, to speak out.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

The American doctors and nurses who risked their lives to go treat the wounded in the middle of a killing field. The puppet-maker who, injured and driven from his home, kept making dolls to entertain the children…

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Alongside the ledger of atrocity, I keep another. The Palestinian doctor who would not abandon his patients, even as the bombs closed in. The Icelandic writer who raised money to get the displaced out of #Gaza…

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

And every time they hear a politician profess the supremacy of international law, of human rights, of equality for all, they will hear only the sounds of #screaming.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

There will be people who never move on, who to the end of their lives struggle to unsee the image of the body turned to red paste,the #child forced to eat animal feed,the bones pushing against the skin,the slow extinguishing of life
-Omar El Akkad: One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

The soldier who drove the tank over the handcuffed body, who heard the sound and felt the rupture, might come home to a high school sweetheart and get down on one knee and might have children of his own one day.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

The patrol that opened fire on the starving civilians might meet up every now and then for karaoke nights, might celebrate what they did when it is still acceptable, but over the years bond over a shared silence thicker than blood

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

One day…

The man who put the bullet in the little girl’s head might return to coach Little League games.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

…as though no one had screamed warnings at the top of their lungs back when there was time to do something.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Entire departments of #postcolonial studies will churn out papers interrogating the obliviousness that led us all to that very dark place, as though no one had seen from the beginning exactly what that place was…

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

The truth and reconciliation committees are coming. The land acknowledgments are coming. The very sorry descendants are coming.

-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.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

The liberal class that acquiesced so begrudgingly to the least of measures will find that a sizable contingent who might have previously aligned with its ideals can no longer bring themselves to do so.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

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

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

One day this will end. In #liberation, in peace, or in eradication at a scale so overwhelming it resets history.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

I’m reminded of what Susan Sontag was supposed to have said about the great lesson of the Second World War: that 10% of people are fundamentally #good, 10 are fundamentally #evil, and the other 80 are swayable in either direction.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

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.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day,

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.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

What purer expression of #power than to say: I know.I know but will do nothing so long as it benefits me.Only later, when when it ceases to benefit me, will I proclaim in great sobs my #grief that such a thing was allowed to happen
-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

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.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

By the standards of Western #normalcy, where the possibility of missile landing on one’s house or a military sniper murdering one’s #children is so implausible as to be indistinguishable from #sciencefiction, even minimal inconvenience is tantamount to #apocalypse.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day,

Two hands 🙌🏼

Every derailment of #normalcy matters when what’s becoming normal is a #genocide.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This