May you be comforted
I think a lot about the responsibilities I have to reduce and prevent harm in the world. Which is sometimes, but not always, similar to using my skills and talents for good. But there is no way, as more and more people die, as more and more people are actively in danger, to be neutral.
Describing a lie that is targeted to put the lives of doctors at risk as an “inaccurate refrain” is choosing to do harm. Ignoring the reality of systemic racism and the dangerous interplay of surveillance and gentrification is choosing to do harm.
Believing that none of this ~sort of thing~ is happening at your company or your school or in your network is wilful delusion.
Many of us will not make it out the other side. Many of us cannot rely on there being another side to make it to. Some of us have been in danger for a long time; some of us who have always been in danger. Because the danger is not new. The complicit silence is not new. The threat is ancient. The means, ah but the means are novel.
“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow this? / And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow this?” - from A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck in Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky.