Jarh L. Rodriguez’s Reviews > One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This > Status Update

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 hurdle 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, that just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away.

There will be more moments of terror, both state-sanctioned and coldly brutally individual. Only some of these acts will be formally labeled terror, though, because in the hierarchy of the Western world, revenge is a carefully delineated thing around which whole histories and peoples must be ordered to make certain violence regrettable but understandable and other violence savage and infinitely punishable

The director, acknowledging at the start of a reading that so much of what we do right now feels so pointless, returns still to the rallying cry issued by the Palestinian poet Rashid Abu Hadi: “Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. If it's a handful, throw it. If it's a fingernail, scrape it out and throw it. Get in the way, however you can"

When the worlds wealthiest nations decide on the flimsiest pretext to cut funding to the one agency that stands between thousands of civilians and slow hideous death by starvation, it is a prudent anti-terrorism measure. When voters decide they cannot in good conscience participate in the re-election of anyone who allows this starvation to happen, they are branded enablers of a fascist takeover of Western democracy

Any society whose functioning demands that one ignore carnage of this scale for the sake of artificial normalcy is, by definition, sociopathic

That in the end there is no international rules-based order, no universal human rights, no equal justice for all, simply fleeting arrangements of convenience in which any amount of human collateral is deemed acceptable so long as it works in the empire's interest

When a white man kills dozens of people in a concert, a synagogue, or a school, it's a crime, a hate crime sometimes, but terrorism requires a distance between state and perpetrator wide enough to fit a different kind of fear: the kind of fear that justifies the creation of entirely new laws, new modes of detention, new apparatuses of surveillance, anything, anything at all

But so many will remember. We say that, sometimes, when it's our children killed: remember. It may seem now like it's someone else's children but there's no such thing as someone else's children. The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one's opponent has descended, while simultaneously digging one's own, is that eventually it gets too dark to tell the difference

One day the killing will be over, either because the oppressed will have their liberation or because there will be so few left to kill. We will be expected to forget any of it ever happened, to acknowledge it if need be, but only in harmless perfunctory ways. Many of us will, if only as a kind of psychological self-defense. So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting