** Are we the baddies? **
Rockets fall. Lie flat, open your mouth, blunt the shockwave. Witness empire up close—papers for bodies that were lives that were souls. Countless. What do you do with this moral shockwave, how do you speak?
I’ve been there.
One Day is Omar El Akkad’s grappling with moral injury. He is incandescent over Gaza, his pain so bright it blinds everything else. But incandescence without clarity burns indiscrimanently—and without purpose. At its best, this could have been Between the World and Me for Arab‑Americans. Instead, he spends his force arguing universal culpability. I remember feeling that after Iraq.
The truth: as agents of empire, we are all the baddies. But the story Akkad derides—the fiction of being part of the good guys, even when that side is empire—is essential. Without the story, we cannot have the moral injury. Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Gaza: black marks not only because of cruelty, but because they betrayed proclaimed ideals. Ideals unfulfilled—or even misguided—are still pillars from which to launch change. Akkad collapses nuance into result, and in doing so, exacerbates the cycle he laments.
To find good and to do good in the face of empire, one must refine the terrible, split grass blades. Akkad cannot—or will not. This is a work of grief. I don’t fault him. But I’m sad that this book fixes the world in mourning, without opening space for repair.