Everything is implicated

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English Quakers navigate life on a Barbados plantation. (Image courtesy of New York Public Library)

“The money being spent on bombing Gaza could be spent on paying our teachers, funding our healthcare, fixing our roads, or making college affordable. But instead it’s being used to kill innocent children. Stopping genocide isn’t one issue. It’s literally every issue.”

-Qasim Rachid on Threads

The one-year anniversary of the precipitating event of the Gaza war may have given those who have not adopted the cause of protesting the war as an existential concern a moment to wonder how this atrocity, in a world with many ongoing and horrific conflicts, captured such focused attention.

One of the significant reasons is that America continues to arm our ally, Israel, as it conducts the war, making us complicit. Many of us are wrestling with “unwilling complicity,” and how enmeshed we are in systems — including a web of international relationships based on many things as much as on principle — that result in outcomes we deplore.

It is reminding me (forgive my perhaps oversimplified analogy here) of the period in American history when the abolition movement was attempting to end the long-standing practice of enslaving other humans. The hurdles faced were economic ones as much as moral ones. While, yes, there were those who believed that people of African descent were inferior, or destined for this fate, there were far more, in fact almost all Americans, who were embedded in an economy fueled by slavery.

Whether by wearing cotton clothes, using sugar in your tea, or working in factories in “free” Rhode Island that made cloth for shipment to plantations, your daily life was complicit, and hard to imagine untangling. This is not just a judgment in hindsight. In the 18th century, Pennsylvania abolitionist Benjamin Lay attempted to remove himself from an economy that supported an atrocity and ended up living in a cave and making his own food and clothes.

We, too, will have a hard time removing ourselves from all participation in injustice. Everything is interconnected. But the implication that removing one injustice will result in righteousness may simply not be true.

Ending funding to Israel, even if you see it as a clear imperative, is unlikely to end violence in the Middle East. It will not automatically free up money for the common good. It will not solve the longstanding problems we face, nationally or in the world. And, it may have consequences that include more deplorable injustice.

The implication that removing one injustice will result in righteousness may simply not be true.

This dilemma makes me reflect on my long-standing personal practice of withholding my economic participation from entities I find immoral. I don’t buy meat or eggs from factory farms and keep my admittedly small investments away from companies I think are doing the world actual harm.

But, as I think about Benjamin Lay, I am finding that these efforts are likely appeasing my sense of myself more than forcing change in the world or in my country. And I have to recognize that I buy a new cell phone every couple of years, even though I know they are manufactured in factories staffed by children, with materials mined by people living in unacceptable conditions. I am choosing when and how to employ my morality. If I am honest, I do it when it is convenient, and when I can afford to.

How we live within this world, at the same time that we work towards making it more just, is a difficult conundrum. Add in the fact that we are diverse enough to often disagree on what “just” actually is and it can feel impossible.

None of this should stop any American from agitating for what they believe is right; this is an essential part of our legacy and our culture, and how we persuade each other. Nor should we stop withholding our participation, as we can, in institutions whose actions we cannot support. These may be the best ways we have to inch this battleship of a nation into a better direction, even as we live with ripples of discomfort with our circumstances.

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