A question:
If you don’t stand for what you believe in, then what do you stand for?
If you refuse the call to consume indefinitely, to harm others for your own gain, to expand at all costs; if you refuse to betray your siblings but don’t fill the void with something that you will do, something that you do stand for; what are you?
You are cancer inverted. You are a hole. In your refusal to consume or commit, you consume yourself in an attempt to remain palatable to both cancer and those who refuse it, and in doing so, you become part of the problem. Either you eat yourself whole or you consume others to try to become a person again.
Or you break out of the hole by choosing something for yourself, something that other people might dislike.
What do you care about? What matters to you? What drives you to motion? If the answer is “nothing”, think again. If the answer comes from People Pleasing, think again. You are more than how likeable you are.
This doesn’t mean that you have to become some hyper-activist or do things that you hate. It does mean that you need to have something, anything that you both believe in and will hold against resistance from others. It can be a petty hill, but make it your hill.
Be the guy that really likes spiders, even around people that squish every spider they see. Be the person who thinks socks and sandals are good, actually, even when someone ridicules you for it. Pick an opinion and continue to hold it when people disagree with you.
Climb out of the hole of non-commitment and learn who you really are.
# One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
It is an admirable thing, in a politics possessed of a moral floor, to believe one can change the system from the inside, that with enough respectful prodding the establishment can be made to bend, like that famous arc, toward justice. But when, after decades of such thinking, decades of respectful prodding, the condition one arrives at is reticent acceptance of genocide, is it not at least worth considering that you are not changing the system nearly as much as the system is changing you?
A few months into the genocide, protesters are regularly interrupting Democratic Party events. Dozens of major universities across the country come to a standstill as students build encampments to protest the killing. It harkens most clearly to the anti-apartheid movement of the eighties and the antiwar and civil rights protests of the sixties - all of them, too, led overwhelmingly by young people and derided as naive and inconsequential until they weren’t, until they became central facets of the story the United States tells itself about how, inevitably, justice prevails.
Once again, the party’s supporters react to these demonstrations by chanting “Four more years, four more years,” which by now can no longer be described as simply ghoulish. There is instead a kind of mechanical fear laced in it, a sense among these people, as there has been a sense among all people at all times on whom the judgment of future historians has started to dawn, that they have stepped too far into complicity with something evil.
It’s difficult to live in this country in this moment and not come to the conclusion that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times, not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be. Being seen as someone who believes in justice - not the messy, fraught work of achieving it - is the starting point of any conversation on justice. Saying the right slogans supersedes whatever it is those slogans are supposed to oblige. It makes sense - when there are no real personal stakes, when the missiles are landing on someone far away, being seen as good is good enough.
Every morning a small army of spokespeople step to the lecterns and deliver statements about how much the president cares for innocent lives, or the immense effort the United States makes to minimize unnecessary suffering, or whatever it is that needs to be said that day so as to launder the evil done between the last press conference and this one. A growing number of people ask a different question; the world asks a different question. The world, full of people who factor not one iota in the calculus of those morning meetings, looks upon this and asks, simply: Beyond self-interest, what do you believe in? And every morning the answer, dressed up in anesthetic euphemism and dependent on our collective capacity for resignation to the lesser of two evils, is: Nothing. (see also: Cancer)
Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, 2025