TURN YOUR FACE TO THE EAST AND WEST

https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2017/08/21/turn-your-face-to-the-east-and-west/

…and find no difference

Anyone who incites violence in the name of what is right possesses a personal agenda

There is always something to love about every country. There is an America one can love, a United States not raised on the murder of its original population, an aspect that is not political, not based on wars, just as there were three sets of people, one (in the minority) segment that voted the current President into power in the last elections, one that voted for someone else, and one that did not vote at all.  This side that you see now makes you want to weep. It is like finding a friend humiliatingly, stinking drunk, lurching from one end of the room to another, screaming inanities. This is not the America of warm people, not the America that was nurtured on ideals, the America that gave the world some of the greatest technology it has seen in modern times, or the America that took man to the moon. It is an America that saw the moon and leered at it, and said it was like…fill in whichever part of a woman’s anatomy here…and slobbered.

But then again, which part of the world is preferable? The world has become an insidious place, full of treacherous agendas and hatred. There are those who will read the paragraph above and will scoff and ask who it was that killed millions in Iraq and Afghanistan, that killed millions more in Vietnam, and Japan and Korea, but tell me, who is it that is working its way up to killing another large number in sectarian violence, in mindless political gatherings, in abductions? Who is joining alliances that are equipped to kill, based on ideological differences alone? Pakistan today…and for a long time now…has made its people weep.

One hears what people say in this country, and their tone is supremely sanctimonious when they criticise what is currently happening in the US, the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, the riots, the murder of Heather Heyer, the violence following the pulling down of the confederate statue, and the inane threats tossed around between the POTUS and Kim Yong-un. But it is in our own interests to see the carefully nurtured conflict between India and Pakistan for what it is, to realise that sectarian violence here is the same as Neo-Nazism and White Supremacist groups and riots elsewhere. It is as wrong for the judiciary to function under an agenda as it is for the Mooch to kiss the President’s butt, or for people to stomp with so much venom on the fallen confederate statue. Where is the difference between the shouted rhetoric of anyone atop a container, bearded, un-bearded, fat, capped, or good-looking…and a man who trumpet’s his prejudice and vulgarity into the ears of an astounded world that has long strived to move away from the values he defends?

It has been a long, hard slog that attempt to pull oneself out of the depths into which for some reason humans love to wallow. In Pakistan the greatest victims have been the Hazara people, the Shias, the people of the Ahmadiyya faith, Christians and Hindus, the poor because their issues and all other issues have received no attention, and the entire country in their wake. We have a long way to go. One mocks the Sadiq and Amin clause in the constitution, and questions who, after all, is Sadiq and Amin. It bears thinking then: who after all is Muslim? Does anyone know, or is this the business of God alone? So what does it matter who has a white skin and who does not? I know people who are ‘white’ but who are a shade darker than I am. Where do they fit on the scale of supremacy? Does it matter? Is this insistence on proving yourself Muslim and who knows what else a bid for attention on the part of some people, for power on the part of others, and sheer dumb ignorance on the part of others? And yet everyone is drawn into the resultant tide of violence and vituperative rhetoric.

It needs no telling who the victims were in the Jewish holocaust in Germany, and as a result of the white supremacy hallucinations, that people such as Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Lincoln, and Rosa Parks amongst so many others fought to dispel.

Such things will only and only ever be defeated by rational dialogue, by planning and education. They can never be defeated by slogans, by waving fists in the air, stones, sticks or bullets. Anyone who incites violence in the name of what is right should instantly be known for possessing a personal agenda, which takes down many people, from the President of the United States who advocates police brutality and endorses racist violence to almost every prominent politician in this country. All such people from one end of the world to the other have a lot in common. They all shoot their mouth, they all yell into the mike, they all wave a self-righteous finger into the air and pump their fists. Each one of them appeals to emotion alone, and to the lowest of base instincts in the people they profess to govern, and never, ever to reason.

Given rational education and only then can there be less violence and hate in the world, and on television. If it weren’t for Coke Studio, the tube would self-destruct. On which ridiculous note this had better end.