One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad explores the attitudes of the West toward other people and other nations in language, particularly Middle Eastern nations, that is brilliant in its simplicity. El Akkad doesn't sugarcoat the message about how powerful people strive to hold onto power and expand that power at the expense of those who they see as powerless but also deem dangerous. One, Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This exposes how the media and various governments push the agenda of the powerful until the damage is done and can't be reversed before they pivot to talk about how horrible things were and then seek out quotes to prove they were always against the atrocity even when the body of evidence proves otherwise. El Akkad had me nodding along with his assessments, wincing at his observations, and blinking back tears at his descriptions. He weaves the past with the present and the personal with the societal in ways that demonstrate how the past informs the present and we are all connected. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This offers us the opportunity to learn from the past and be against the atrocities in Palestine and around the world in real time rather than looking back and being against it in hindsight while encouraging us to not only be against the atrocities but to speak up, speak out, and do what we can to change the world we live in.


Currently Reading:


Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer

A Beginner's Guide to American Mah Jongg: How to Play the Game & Win by Elaine Sandberg

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn 

We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word by Franny Choi, Bao Phi, No'u Revilla, and Terisa Siagaonu (editors)


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