Time & Perspective Quote by William Kunstler

Kunstler’s line doesn’t court comfort; it tries to commandeer your posture. “Our bodies” is the tell. He’s not talking about opinions, petitions, or moral vibes. He’s talking about presence: streets, courtrooms, picket lines, the places where power becomes physical and where dissent is easiest to ignore when it stays abstract. The sentence itself rushes forward in a kind of breathless insistence, repeating “the moment” like an alarm bell. It’s rhetoric as urgency, not elegance.

The subtext is an activist’s hard-earned suspicion of complacency. Forgetfulness isn’t a private lapse here; it’s a political event. “Lazy” and “sit back” aren’t character critiques so much as warnings about what systems count on: that outrage will eventually tire, that people will outsource conflict to professionals, that the state’s machinery will keep running while citizens pause. Kunstler’s career - defending civil rights organizers, antiwar activists, and defendants the mainstream wanted disappeared - makes the claim feel less like metaphor and more like field report.

Then he drops the darkest, most provocative phrase: “the evil ones do their ordained tasks.” “Ordained” is doing double duty. It suggests inevitability (they will do it), while mocking the way institutions sanctify their own violence as duty, procedure, “just doing my job.” He’s insisting that repression isn’t an aberration; it’s a function. The intent is to make withdrawal feel not neutral but enabling - because if bodies aren’t present in the struggle, other bodies will be processed by it.