A few weeks ago, I was on a flight back to Atlanta from a trip to Mexico. Right before we landed, a storm popped up over the Atlanta airport, causing us to go into a holding pattern, and then another holding pattern, and eventually, since the storm did not let up, to make a detour to Savannah, about an hour away by air. The storm occurred on June 27, during the peak of the July 4 travel season. Hail damaged multiple planes at the airport, and it caused the diversion of almost 100 flights into the airport that night and the cancellation or delay of hundreds of others over the next few days.

When we arrived in Savannah, we could not disembark the plane because, since we were an international flight, we had to go through customs, and Savannah’s airport does not have a regular customs staff because it is not an international airport. So, we had to wait for customs officials to arrive from the port, and our plane was third in line for customs. We sat on the tarmac for four hours, waiting to even get off of the plane. When we did get off of the plane, at around 1:00 am, we were not at the main terminal but instead at a terminal used for smaller aircraft and private flights. We collected our baggage there and went through customs before queueing up for transport to the main terminal, transport which consisted of small to medium sized vans to shuttle thousands of passengers from the eight planes that got diverted to Savannah to the terminal.

Then, once we arrived in the terminal, we received no information about possible flights back to Atlanta. We piled up on the floor and tried to get some sleep. Some tried to call Delta’s customer service, only to be greeted with a seven hour wait time, and others looked for rental cars, which they couldn’t get till 7:00 am. I sat there, thinking about the fact that I had not, since earlier in the day, had anything substantive to eat, and tried to sleep in between calls back home. Nothing changed. No news came in. I struck up conversations with various people, and one person told me they had to get back to Atlanta because they had to make it their niece’s wedding, at 3:00 pm, close to Savannah. They had to get back to Atlanta because they had their suit in the car in the parking lot. Atlanta is a 3 1/2 hour drive from Savannah.

The person decided to rent a car, but since the rental companies didn’t open till 7:00, they changed their mind and got an Uber. They allowed me to pay some of the cost and ride back to Atlanta with them so I could get my car and head home. The Uber driver drove us to Atlanta’s airport, and once there, I spent another hour or two, walking through a sea of passengers who had their flights delayed or canceled, to the shuttle that would take me to my own car. I made it home after being up for around 28–30 hours, something I haven’t done in a long, long time. As I went through this ordeal, I observed those around me, seeing some get irritated at the “inconvenience” and others go along with the flow. I was frustrated, yes, but I also knew that nothing anyone did caused this. It happened due to weather. Yes, I was inconvenienced. Yes, I was frustrated and tired. However, it was not something that would cause me harm.

What I endured did not involve bombs, missiles, the threat of starvation, the destruction of hospitals, libraries, schools, the maiming of children, the execution of individuals. It involved an “inconvenience,” a diversion from my pre-arranged plans. Nothing more. In the airport, I thought about how we each react if the entire system broke down, if we had to rely on one another to survive. I thought about the fact that elsewhere in the world, Gaza, Ukraine, Congo, people faced life and death events, not minor “inconveniences.” I thought about all of this as I read Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This, a memoir where Akkad points out that even when we see a genocide occurring before our very eyes as Israel murders Palestinians, we go on with our lives, choosing our convenience, our same-day delivery over the lives of hundreds and thousands of children, men, and women because we do not view them as worthy, as human. Yet, years from now, we will look back and say, “I was always against the atrocity. The murder. The genocide.”

I struggle, all of the time, with what to do, what to say, how to engage. I fear, as Akkad points out, a loss of my own stability. I am self-interested in preserving myself and my way of life. I know that, and I ask myself, again and again, “What am I willing to give up? What am I willing to relinquish for what is right?” Our self-interest keeps us from acting. It keeps us in line. It keeps us from speaking out against the genocide of Palestinians. It keeps us from speaking out against the administrations treatment of immigrants. It keeps us from speaking out on a myriad of issues that impact others but not ourselves. We don’t speak out because it happens to “them,” not to “us.” We don’t speak out because we have been trained to think of “them” as non-human, as not “us,” and thus as not worthy of our time and energy.

We live in a nation built on self-interest. We have been taught, from our earliest days, in American exceptionalism. We drank the Kool-Aid, and we liked it. We think of ourselves above others, ignoring even our neighbors in the process, giving platitudes when something bad happens to them, but nothing more because it was them, not me. Our overwhelming feeling of entitlement and actions based on our self-interest will be our downfall because when we act in this manner we isolate ourselves from others, from love, from community, from collaboration. We become sealed within ourselves.

Yet, when we see the atrocities around us and want to do something, we feel paralyzed because we ask, “What can I, as one person, do?” We can each do what we can do. Small acts, in our own personal capacities, accumulated together, make an impact. Amidst the deluge of self-interest, Akkad remains hopeful when seeing acts that go against one’s self-interest. He writes, “These acts of overwhelming personal consequence shatter the brittle veneer of the world as a place of total self-interest. But even the smallest acts matter.” These could be anything from conversations with people, reading books by individuals whose experiences are not your own, working with community organizations, boycotting companies that support things that harm others, supporting individuals in the streets protesting on behalf of themselves and others, and on and on. One size does not fit all. Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi writes, “Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. If it’s a handful, throw it. If it’s a fingernail full, scrape it out and throw.” Sand sticks to the gears, gumming up the works. Any sand will do, large or small.

Words acts as sand. Akakd’s memoir, Abdulhadi’s poetry, and others serve as sand in the gears, scooped up from the ground and thrown into the machinery that seeks to destroy. I could visibly see some people in Savannah getting irate, yelling at those who were there to help us. The “inconvenience” of having to alter their plans, their own self-interest, trumped others. They thought only of themselves and their ability to survive what, in the grand scheme of things, was a minor-inconvenience. They were, as Noor Hindi writes in her poem “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” the colonizers who “write about flowers” while children hurl “rocks at Israeli tanks second before becoming daises.”

What do we do when we feel that our resistance will have no impact? Well, we resist anyways in the ways that we can. We train our selves, inwardly, to resist. Akkad writes, “every small act of resistance trains the muscle used to do it.” We find it easier to walk away from goods and things that harm the more one does it. “One builds the muscle,” Akkad states, “by walking away from the most minor things — trivial consumables, the cultural work of monsters, the myriad material fruits grown on stolen ground — and realizes in the doing of these things that there is a wide spectrum of negative resistance.” The point is we can all do something, somewhere, somehow. We have power. We have a voice. We must use these tools to speak out and condemn atrocities, making sure we stand against them in the moment, not when it becomes acceptable to stand against them.

What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.