THE OPRESSORS, AND WHO THEY ARE
And in another hundred years, people will ask each other: 'Did you know one of them?' The people we cast out, and called inferior and superfluous, because we thought we were better. The walls we built between us and them made us feel safe, surely. It allowed us to forget, for a while, before the eye of the world saw and accused us grantly of great injustice. But we had a million reasons, each unanimously understood by our peers without even being voiced; it was that kind of thing we agreed to agree on without questioning. Asking too many questions was that kind of thing that got you a one-way ticket to the side of them anyways, and you could be sure that they wouldn't be too welcoming after all we'd done to them, naturally.
So we censure our words and keep our opinions our own, to safe ourselves and our families. And so we silently take part by being witness to something other, a cruelty that makes us wince during the day and scream when our sleep mingles with nightmares, and we do not interfere. We read our texts with barren voices when asked to, as actors voicing Judas's betrayal, rejecting the defenseless because we are too afraid to be rejected ourselves. In a way, we are oppressed by this trickery imposed on us, but this we too cannot acknowledge, because to do so would be to side with the enemy, and enemies are dealt with swiftly. We both know that they are never seen again.
A hundred years is a hundred too many. I want to ask you this question now: did you know one of them? The men and women we told to go away, because their cultures did not resemble ours closely enough, because their views were counter to our own, because we felt we could not relate to them? Did they really deserve that fate? Or is it, in fact, us, who deserve to be rejected by the world for having agreed silently to such a thing unspeakable without a word of protest?