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contemplatelit.bsky.social
contemplatelit
@contemplatelit.bsky.social
words i see on pages | earthseed | fiction | mindfulness | end apartheid 🇵🇸
Pinned
What I wear is pants.
What I do is live.
How I pray is #breathe.

-Thomas Merton, Day of a Stranger
Even so, why can’t I do what others have done—ignore the obvious. Live a #normal life. It’s hard enough just to do that in this world.

-Lauren Olamina in Octavia E. Butler’s #Parable of the Sower
January 1, 2026 at 1:40 AM
Favorite books this year:

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad
Dawn, Octavia E. Butler
Imago, Octavia E. Butler
Adulthood Rites, Octavia E. Butler
Red Rising, Pierce Brown
A People’s History of the United States: Highlights from the 20th Century, Howard Zinn
December 31, 2025 at 6:39 PM
None of this #evil was ever necessary.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 30, 2025 at 3:31 AM
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 in annihilation.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 30, 2025 at 3:30 AM
Alongside the ledger of atrocity, I keep another. The Palestinian doctor who would not abandon his patients, even as the bombs closed in. The Icelandic writer who raised money to get the displaced out of #Gaza

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 30, 2025 at 3:24 AM
There will be people who never move on, who to the end of their lives struggle to unsee the image of the body turned to red paste,the #child forced to eat animal feed,the bones pushing against the skin,the slow extinguishing of life
-Omar El Akkad: One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 30, 2025 at 3:21 AM
One day…

The man who put the bullet in the little girl’s head might return to coach Little League games.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 30, 2025 at 3:11 AM
Entire departments of #postcolonial studies will churn out papers interrogating the obliviousness that led us all to that very dark place, as though no one had seen from the beginning exactly what that place was…

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 30, 2025 at 3:08 AM
One day it will be considered unacceptable in the polite liberal circles of the West, not to acknowledge all the innocent people killed in that long-ago unpleasantness.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 30, 2025 at 3:02 AM
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.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 30, 2025 at 2:57 AM
When the time comes to assign blame, most of those to blame will be long gone.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 30, 2025 at 2:54 AM
One day this will end. In #liberation, in peace, or in eradication at a scale so overwhelming it resets history.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 30, 2025 at 2:53 AM
I’m reminded of what Susan Sontag was supposed to have said about the great lesson of the Second World War: that 10% of people are fundamentally #good, 10 are fundamentally #evil, and the other 80 are swayable in either direction.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 29, 2025 at 6:41 AM
Reposted by contemplatelit
I’m only 3/4ths through this book, but I’m wrecked. Lots of people have correctly noted that it feels important, but (a) he’s a damn good storyteller, and (b) it’s hard to read this and not constantly see how the attempt to prop up the violence of western hegemony wrecks all our lives
December 28, 2025 at 5:41 PM
Perhaps that is what this all comes to, in the end, some pathetic adherence to the idea that certain peoples simply need to be crushed.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 29, 2025 at 12:29 AM
What purer expression of #power than to say: I know.I know but will do nothing so long as it benefits me.Only later, when when it ceases to benefit me, will I proclaim in great sobs my #grief that such a thing was allowed to happen
-Omar El Akkad: One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 29, 2025 at 12:24 AM
When the #Israeli military opens fire on starving #civilians clambering for flour, The Guardian describes the killings as “food aid-related deaths.” One struggles to imagine how food aid could do such a thing.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 29, 2025 at 12:19 AM
Maybe it’s not all that much trouble to avoid ordering #coffee and downloading apps and buying chocolate-flavored hummus from companies that abide slaughter.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 29, 2025 at 12:14 AM
By the standards of Western #normalcy, where the possibility of missile landing on one’s house or a military sniper murdering one’s #children is so implausible as to be indistinguishable from #sciencefiction, even minimal inconvenience is tantamount to #apocalypse.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day,
December 29, 2025 at 12:11 AM
Every derailment of #normalcy matters when what’s becoming normal is a #genocide.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 28, 2025 at 7:20 PM
What is the #ethical legitimacy of any system in which one has to hope the most privileged of global society decides that a sufficient number of #children have been #murdered to warrant choosing a different brand of couscous?

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 28, 2025 at 7:17 PM
In the midst of the world’s first live-streamed #genocide, when plain before the eyes of anyone who cares to look are shown the most visceral details, one of the few things that inspires any real panic on Western power centers is the prospect of reduced shipping though the #RedSea.

-Omar El Akkad
December 28, 2025 at 7:14 PM
The gears will grind to a halt one day, and the #silence that waits then, for those who commanded this killing and for those who said #nothing, will be of a far more burrowing kind.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 28, 2025 at 7:06 PM
No society in human history has ever #donated or #applauded its way out of a #genocide.

-Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 28, 2025 at 7:02 PM
Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi: “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 full, scrape it out and throw. Get in the way however you can.”

-Omar El Akkad: One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
December 28, 2025 at 7:00 PM