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

It is always possible to stop looking away. None of this evil was ever necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we'll learn to lay tracks on air.

It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation.

One day there will be no more looking away. Looking away from climate disaster, from the last rabid takings of extractive capitalism, from the killing...and yes soon enough it will come to our doorstep...but until then, until that very last moment, it's important to understand that this really is the best way of doing things.

The liberal class that acquiesced so begrudgingly to the least of measures will find that a sizable contingent who might have previously aligned with its ideals can no longer bring themselves to do so. Not after what has been done, what has been see, what cannot be forgotten.

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?