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

There are people, some of them once very dear to me, to whom I will never speak again so long as I can help it. It's the people who knew full well what was happening and said nothing because there was a personal risk to it, a chance of getting yelled at, or God forbid, a chance of professional ramifications. It's the people who dug deeply into the paramount importance of their own safety, their own convenience.

To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice but not others by someone who doesn't care about any of them is to be told, simply, to keep quiet.

What are you willing to give up to alleviate someone else's suffering? It makes it impossible for one so engaged to not understand, with terrible clarity, that under the auspices of this machine, the prevailing answer echoing from the mouths of so many of one's own neighbors is: Nothing at all.

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.

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.