Hannah

“It suddenly becomes insufficient to say: Elect us or else they will abolish abortion rights; elect us or they will put more migrants in concentration camps; elect us or they will make your lives so much worse. What is the use, once elected, of doing anything of substance when what was necessary, the negation of some other hypothetical outcome, has by definition already been achieved?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Anyone who has dragged a relative out from under the wreckage of a bombed building, who has held a friend bleeding to death in the street while the officer who pulled the trigger looks on, who has watched their water poisoned, their land burned, their communities starved, is intimately well versed in love. But in the eyes of the empire such a thing can never be called love, because the directive was never in the first place, Love, but rather, Love me. In spite of it all, love me.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“And the obvious centrist refrain—But do you want the deranged right wing to win?—should, after even a moment of self-reflection, yield to a far more important question: How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Asked again to peel back our scabs, to bare our festering places, hanging our heads over the blood. We were not asked who had cut us, or why the injuries went uncleaned.”
― Sarah Aziza, The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders