Book Report: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

7. Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025) (3/29/26)

On October 25, 2023, the journalist and writer Omar El Akkad wrote on X: "One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this."

He was writing about Gaza—and about the West, about privilege, about power structures and power plays. He was writing about death and destruction, about lives turned topsy-turvy. And to what end? What does all the killing actually accomplish? Isn't it, simply, abhorrent?

This book is an extension of that tweet.

In it, he provides many anecdotes, which I found easy enough to grasp—anecdotes about love, about confusion, about power, about yearnings, about life's meaning, also about atrocities. He also interrogates this world order, and I found his polemics harder to get a handle on. He has plenty to criticize, but I ended up—as so often in these circumstances—unsure just what we are to do about it all.

El Akkad was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, is now a US citizen. From early on, he experienced the capriciousness of the world order as his father, who worked in the hotel business (think: capitalism, think: third world), tried to follow a career. He brings all those identities to bear here, in what is essentially a critique of western liberalism. 

Lord knows, we are living in a bizarre time when nothing much makes sense. Not Gaza. Not Trump. Not Ukraine. Now, not Iran. I read the news daily, and feel ever more alienated from what I've always thought of as "my country," of "the world." 

Maybe I need to read this book again, slower. Maybe I just need to accept that it will never make sense. That there's so much hatred in the world, so much desperate scrabbling for power.

Although as El Akkad reminds us at the end of his book, while atrocity is rampant, maybe the opposite is indeed stronger: kindness and love, caring and humanity. The final paragraph is this:

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. 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 hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we'll learn to lay tracks on air. 

But: Evil is never necessary. We don't ride around in carriages. There is no cliff. We can't fly. I mean, I get the sentiments, but I guess I'm just overwhelmed by the fact that there are too many of us, and we seem to be ever more at odds. And there is so much fear and hatred and cruelty in the world. That, I don't get. But it's a fact. I would absolutely love it if, today, we could all agree that we've always been against... all the suffering, all the heartache, all the death, all the turmoil. But that doesn't seem to be the human condition. How strange, that we would choose such a state of being. How absolutely strange.

In the meantime, however, I vote, as I have done in every election for 52 years. It often feels meaningless: I live in California; my vote for president has 1/4 the weight of a vote in Wyoming thanks to the stinking electoral college. On Saturday I waved my flag with 10,000(!) others at our local No Kings protest. It feels so small. But it's something.

Sorry, I've not really covered much about this book. You have to read it yourself. Let me know what you think.