Negative Resistance
Learning to walk away from all of it
The machine swallows life and spits out convenience. - Omar El Akkad
On Thursday, at 10:10 am local time, Israeli missiles were fired into the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza City where hundreds of Palestinians had sought shelter. Saad Salameh, 60, was the church’s janitor and the youngest to be killed. Also killed in the attack were Najwa Abu Daoud, 71 and Fumayya Ayyad, 84, three more lives added to the more than 55,000 Palestinians who have been killed since the war began last year.
Also on Thursday, the Justice Department’s civil rights unit petitioned a federal judge to sentence Brett Hankison, the Louisville police officer convicted of killing Breonna Taylor in 2020, to a single day in prison, “a stunning reversal of the unit’s longstanding efforts to address racial disparities in policing.”
Grieving the genocide in Gaza, though he could have also been considering the generations of lethal violence inflicted on Black Americans, Omar El Akkad writes, “I understand this is just how things are, ethical double-jointedness being a necessary requirement for the daily debasement of modern political life.” He means that in this freedom-loving, democracy proclaiming country, we are expected to skim quickly over stories of destruction and inequity like these, to consider them aberrations to the norm despite centuries of evidence to the contrary, and return to business as usual. As though our shared American habitation stood apart from genocide and deadly racism rather having built these evils into the foundation.
How, given this country’s religious-like dedication to not speaking truthfully about reality, are we to respond accurately to the terrifying actions – in Louisville, Gaza, and so many others places under the influence of American empire – being wrought in our names? It was, after all, our former ambassador to the United Nations who signed an artillery shell bound for Gaza, “Finish them!” It is our Department of Justice redirecting its attention from racist police misconduct to, among other things, so-called anti-Christian bias.
One of our options is to actively resist the most devious expressions of society’s wickedness. I’m no stranger to the protests which semi-regularly fill Chicago’s streets. In the signs, chants, songs, and speeches we glimpse active resistance. But while it’s sometimes necessary, active resistance is hard to sustain and, should it choose to do so, the state can easily target this form of defiance.
In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always been Against This, El Akkad suggests another possibility, what he calls negative resistance. This form of resistance recognizes that the miscarriage of justice in Louisville and the bombs and blockades strangling Gaza are not exceptions to the American way of life; these and other state-sponsored or state-enabled violences are thoroughly wound through it. While active resistance might target particular injustices, negative resistance responds to the whole. American power, he writes, “has no idea what to do against negative resistance, against someone who refuses to buy or attend or align, who simply says: I will not be part of this. Against one who walks away.”
Finding ways to walk away from a status quo built on the ongoing destruction of nature and neighbor is a witness against the obscenities which pass for normalcy in our country. Maybe more importantly is the way opting out of one oppressive structure prepares us to see some of the others which have, thus far, escaped our awareness. Negative resistance builds the muscle memory of our deepest convictions. For example, learning to walk away from ordering cheap stuff fast out of disgust for our throw-away economy’s impact on the environment may lead me to notice the neighbors whose poorly compensated labor is a byproduct of that same economy.
I think there is an additional benefit. Making the seemingly useless choice for negative resistance – what can just one person do?! – provides the moral foundation from which a person can imagine and participate in the kingdom of God. In other words, walking away from the status quo strikes me as a distinctly Christian decision. We are people who believe that the kingdoms of this world will fall and, until they do, likewise believe they do not accurately reflect what is most true about the universe– that everything has been created, redeemed, and sustained by Jesus Christ whose lordship and reign is peace. To find ways to walk away from the lies of endless consumption, justified violence, dehumanized populations of war-ravaged people is to choose harmony with God’s alternative kingdom of righteousness and shalom.
Does this all sound rather radical, the sort of thing we tolerate in young people for a while before requiring them to make peace with an economy which demands of us passive acquiescence as we participate in the plundering of creation via 24-hour delivery, on-demand entertainment, and retirement plans invested in the planet’s destruction? To pull persistently against this imperial inertia requires that we make covenant with those for whom such participation in the status quo will never be an option, whose lives are the very fodder for the machine’s insatiable appetites. Until these women and men become our kin, the heart of our deepest solidarity, we will always be lured back into the logic of violent extraction.
“The walking away,” writes El Akkad, “is not nihilism, it’s not cynicism, it’s not doing nothing – it’s a form of engagement more honest, more soul-affirming, than anything the system was prepared to offer.” During these cruel and chaotic days, I’ve wondered about God’s invitation to his people. To what sorts of creative possibilities, amidst so much destruction, are we being invited? Might it be that these revealing days are the Spirit’s call to begin walking away from the death-dealing kingdoms of this world for the sake of something so much better? Or, as Jesus succinctly and rhetorically asked, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” Negative resistance, then, is not only walking away; we’re choosing to walk toward life itself.
(Photo credit: the Holy Family Catholic Church after this the attack this week.)
The View From Here
You don’t go to a White Sox game hoping for a win. No, you go hoping that a giant thunderstorm will pass through in the six inning of Italian-American heritage night and turn the entire sparsely filled stadium into a giant sing-along to Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra songs. Thankfully that’s exactly what happened when my sons, dad, and I attended a recent game. Perfection!