Kat Gale’s Reviews > One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This > Status Update

Every small act of resistance trains the muscle used to do it...one builds the muscle by walking away from the most minor things and realizes in the doing of these things that...having called for justice in one instance, one might do it again and again, might call for a just world.

Active resistance–showing up to protest and speaking out and working to make change even at the smallest levels, the school boards and town councils–matters. Negative resistance–refusing to participate when the act of participation falls below one's moral threshold–matters.

What is the ethical legitimacy of any system in which one has to hope the most privileged sliver of global society decides, in large enough numbers, that enough migrants have been caged or drowned to make a particular vacation spot unappealing? That the well-being of Congolese children outranks the desire for ever more powerful smartphones?

Whatever will bring an end to this killing is worth doing, but one cannot help but ask: If this system to which I am forced to appeal responds only to attacks on its self-interest, what is there to hope for but that the next glaringly obvious injustice just happens to not quite perfectly intersect with that self-interest?

I hang on to the hope that, presented with proof of injustice, the majority human reflex is to act against it.

Sometimes the powerful commit or condone or bankroll acts of unspeakable evil, and any institution that prioritizes cashing the checks over calling out the evil is no longer an arts organization. It's a reputation-laundering firm with a well-read board.

The least established writers are putting their careers at risk by calling for an end to the wholesale murder of a people. Meanwhile, established writers are either totally silent or engaged in the tritist finger-wagging about how terrible it would be for the art if we get too shrill. Yes, the killing happens now, but there'll be plenty of time later to write very moving stories about the shape&shade of the bones.

I watch some of the quietest, most demure, most inward-looking writers I know–writers I always thought of as obsessed exclusively with the work–act as the most vocal opponents of genocide. Meanwhile, writers who until recently were downright apocalyptic about cancel culture and the necessity of "writing outside yourself" and the epidemic of silencing that plagues our craft suddenly turn awfully quiet.

what shocks the most isn't the cruelty or indifference. Many governments are cruel&indifferent...It's the speeches&statements of eloquently stated concern for human rights&the demand that those who abuse human rights be held to account. &it's the way every ideal turns vaporous the moment it threatens to move beyond the confines of the speeches&statements, the moment it threatens their self-interest.

As a matter of tactics, it is instructive to know that Western power must cater to a sizable swath of people who can be made to care or not care about any issue, any measure of human suffering, so long as it affects the constant availability and prompt delivery of their consumables and conveniences. As a matter of moral health, the same knowledge is horrifying.