Gawking the Pain and Deaths of Others

When bombs blasted through London subways and double-decker bus, I grimaced. No not again. And this time around, it rings to home more closely. My sister is on a study group from her university in Europe for the last few months, and she will be visiting London in the coming days from Italy and France.

That’s what human beings are. When violence seems to be a thing of distant shore, almost abstract in its taste and texture, we feel comfortable in nurturing various kinds of theoretical aspects of wars and terrorism. But when one’s dearest one has remotest chance of being victim, less alone being the unfortunate one, one sees thing from a different perspective.

Yes, there were deadlier attacks and violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and occupied Palestine, Israel, Sudan, Rwanda, Vietnam, South America and many other parts of our world after the deadlier Second World War inferno. Innocent men, women and children were ripped apart from their earthly flesh and bones by powerful explosions of hundreds of pounds of bombs, swishing bullets and bulldozers, or simple primitive machetes were used in fracturing skulls or puncturing lungs and hearts, but that doesn’t provide any humane reasons whatsoever in killing other innocent men, women, and children.

In the times of ignorance like dark ages before (even after) Christianity’s reformation or even in pre-Islamic Arabia (and after), retribution, eye for an eye, was the norm for most intra and inter tribal disputes, witches were burnt to ground, slaves were lynched, defeated forces and civilians of a tribe or nation decimated.

It is not to say that we “moderns” are doing any better either. We shroud our eye for an eye in the cloak of war on terrorism, or “Jihad” or “Crusade” against the “infidels” or “heathens”. The difference is that we have become more playful. We hide our true ugly intentions under the disguise of spreading freedom and liberty or proselytizing religion or beliefs of choice.

Ours are collapsing civilizations, from East to West, North to South. Ours is a dying race cataleptic to see its own making destruction while being secretly euphoric gawking the pain and deaths of others.

For the sake of our loved ones, we must stop!

Regards,
Sohel