If you are a good and decent person, you should read “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.” (If you are not a good person, it’s not going to matter but yes you should read it as well.)
If you are a good and decent person, you will absolutely be traumatized and feel attacked. Good. You should. We all should.
Also, if you are a good and decent person, but also a person that is multitasking about 150 different crises on any given day, chances are you will feel traumatized and attacked but will compartmentalize it. Set it aside for a time when you have space for processing more tragedy and time to brainstorm your response to it. (I’m scheduling these kinds of things well into 2029.)
Which is precisely why you should read this book and let it sit on your heart and mind for as long as you can stand it.
Because honestly, as I kicked this off with, what are we even doing?
Omar El Akkad’s latest is a memoir of sorts, using his life story to date as a timeline depicting his connection to and eventual disenchantment in the West. Now a U.S. citizen, El Akkad was born in Egypt and raised in Qatar and Canada. He uses his childhood to provide color and context to his interpretation of the human psychology we’ve all for the most part assigned or resigned ourselves to in order to justify our relative indifference to the treatment of immigrant populations on a global scale.
With his prose firmly planted in the midst of the crisis in Gaza, El Akkad educates his readers as to the atrocities, the genocide, taking place in plain view. Collectively, we know Palestinians are being murdered every day. We have been provided with what may have initially been considered a reasonable (? Is there anything reasonable about war? Of course not.) excuse for this — the response to the terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023, in Israel.
Nearly two years in, though, and standard social practice has most people tsk-tsking anyone that dare take up the cause of the Palestinians. And that’s at best. At worst, now those people are being rounded up and kicked out of their adopted, if even only temporarily, country.
And when I say “taking up the cause of the Palestinians,” these are not people actively persecuting people of the Jewish faith. Not by a long shot. They simply want an end brought to the starvation of a population, an end to babies and toddlers being murdered by “accidental” bullets, an end to doctors being executed and … picture the worst thing. An end to that.
I’m afraid of mangling this review, because we have been conditioned to believe events like this are complicated. The corporate media, in wanting to appease all, have leaned so hard into both sides-ism, that it’s become a natural reflex for anyone trying to form an opinion. El Akkad addresses this, much more eloquently than I, and the result is a fairly damning indictment of liberal political leadership in the West.
We look away because it hurts too much. Or we look away because to say or do something is inconvenient. We look away because we don’t want to ruffle feathers or offend. And our political leaders on both sides of the aisle look away because are serving masters other than those that voted for them.
El Akkad ends the book with a stark warning that if we continue this practice of pretending this isn’t a thing, that one day, something that actually is a thing in our day to day lives, likely climate change, will land at our feet. And looking away will become an impossibility when suddenly it’s us starving. Or us being driven out by the ruling class because land and food and water are precious commodities.
I can’t tell you what to do. Read the book, at the very least. Think about it. Talk to a friend about it. No one needs to wait until “One Day.” I am so very grateful for El Akkad’s courage to speak truth to power. Here’s hoping we can all tap into that vein.
LitzyDitz 