One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

and people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their existence. As though living was the aberration.

It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.

Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.

It’s a frequent, nauseating political inheritance: come to experience the world under the reign of someone who thinks of you as subhuman, as undeserving of a future, and an ugly impression is settled that true power is the ability to do the same to someone else.

Some, maybe most, might resist the wanting whims of empire, but all must figure out a way to survive them.

It is this impulse, to give your child a fighting chance at privilege by immersing them in the myriad languages of the privileged world, that makes me who I am,

It came to me, a long time later, that the Southeast Asian man had done something worse than dent a fancy car’s bumper. He had violated the bounds of his assumed nonexistence.

Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?

The freedom to become something better than what you were born into, the freedom that comes with an inherent fairness of treatment under law and order and social norm, the freedom to read and write and speak without fear. And more than any of these things, the freedom to be left alone.

There were of course other routine indignities—people instinctively speaking louder and slower once they heard my parents’ accents, the kids at my high school who asked if everyone got around by camel where I came from—but these you learn to flatten into the normal workings of the day, the price of admission.