baylee

“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.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“It’s come to shape the way I think about every country, every community: Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“But in the muck—with salamanders, fairies, and dragons—I am coming to understand, in a visceral way, that being grounded is not a punishment; it is a privilege. The dark recesses of this planet are not hell; they are home.”
― Leigh Ann Henion, Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark

“I feel a sympathy for Jean, Bruno wrote, but I won’t mince words. Whether in a rural outpost or an urban core, trying to dismantle capitalism from within capitalism is a dead end. (It was the first time I’d noticed his use of underlining.)”
― Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake