One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

By Omar El Akkad

Omar El Akkad describes a feeling I have had but could not name.

The dissonance of knowing what is right and pointing out when something is defintely wrong just to be met with the apolotical stare of someone who “Doesn’t know enough”, as if the knowledge is kept behind a great unbreakable vault, or “can’t really deal with the violence” overlooking the fact that being able to choose when to ‘deal’ with violence is a priviledge on its own, but knowing fully well that in a few years these people will be telling their kids how against these attrocities they have always been.

“None of this evil is necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pull us all.”

El Akkad writes about the ingredients it takes to orchestrate apathy towards a genocide. The language it takes, the fear that allows it and the polite wash of history that insists this is not how to resist. Sure, there are more historically contextualising books of Palestine and the history of the region, but what “One Day” offers us is Omar’s lived experiences as an Arab man in the States and Canada, an insight into his professional experiences, and it also gives us genuine adoration, humanity and an unpolegetic narrative that begs us not to look away.

“One Day” is a brutal remainder that when a state commits acts of violence that go against human rights, those human rights are YOUR human rights. They are not some faraway concept that applies to you, but it is optional in other lands. It is your human rights being violated, you just have yet to be affected by it. Perhaps, as El Akkad expresses, we might never be affected by it, due to our geographical location, but it is worth acknowledging that those rights have been weakened, and that means something.

“But for now we argue, in this part of the world, the part not reduced to rubble, about how words make us feel. Its a kind of past time.”