How fucked are we!

A couple of months ago, Nicholas Kristof wrote about a mother/daughter in Aleppo.  After reading that, I took his suggestion and started following them on Twitter.  It has been nothing but tragedies after tragedies. It was surreal to look at photos and videos.  Of bombs falling. Of dead people.  Dead children.  All via their tweets.  In one, the daughter--all of seven years old--noted that her friend died in the bombing. I have no idea how a seven year old deals with the death of her seven year old friend :(

As the Syrian army entered Aleppo, the tweets showed the panic, which culminated with this:

Last message - under heavy bombardments now, can't be alive anymore. When we die, keep talking for 200,000 still inside. BYE.- Fatemah

— Bana Alabed (@AlabedBana) November 27, 2016

A day later:

We have no home now. I got minor injury. I didn't sleep since yesterday, I am hungry. I want to live, I don't want to die. - Bana #Aleppo

— Bana Alabed (@AlabedBana) November 28, 2016

And then a few hours ago:

This is our house, My beloved dolls died in the bombing of our house. I am very sad but happy to be alive.- Bana pic.twitter.com/9i0xxJrQtD

— Bana Alabed (@AlabedBana) November 29, 2016

For now, at least 12 hours ago, they were alive.

As bombs were falling and making the mother/daughter homeless in Aleppo, the president-elect tweeted this:

"@FiIibuster: @jeffzeleny Pathetic - you have no sufficient evidence that Donald Trump did not suffer from voter fraud, shame! Bad reporter.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 29, 2016

When the president-elect is on a completely different war path, what can one do?  Especially in the case of Aleppo, after all the "never again" that the world has uttered over and over again?

what is missing from the international community is nothing more than the actual building blocks of a community – common values. Let’s get right to the heart of the problem. We cannot have a community unless we respect the truth and seek it out; unless we share a broadly similar definition of good and evil; unless we can discriminate between what is important and what is not; unless we are united by shared emotion; or unless we distinguish between values and interests.
In other words, we cannot have an international community unless we hold these values to be universal.

So, then?

We must also fight – and that means speaking out.

But, will the speaking out matter when the president-elect is only concerned about his own ego and he is sucking up all the oxygen in the room?

It may seem useless, but we must never stop speaking out against this. Because it is political. And because it is crucial.

Speaking up is the only action that I know.  So, I will, like with the op-ed, the maniacal Facebook posts, and the maniacal tweets.  And, hopefully sooner than later, here via an open blogging space as well.

ps: I drafted this post a few hours ago. I checked for the Aleppo mother/daughter tweets; yes, they are alive.  But, they tweet this:

APPEAL to the world - I & Bana received death threats & we are convinced Syrian Army will target us soon because of our account and messages

— Bana Alabed (@AlabedBana) November 30, 2016

Making my peace

Syria
Haiti
Afghanistan
Nigeria
...
The list is endless.  A list of countries with humanitarian crises.

Yet, the reality show candidate from the "family values" party has managed to make the year-plus long campaign all about him and his penis.  Nero playing the fiddle is, by comparison, a much more empathetic act!

A couple of days ago, the New York Times had these photographs of refugees..  Fleeing from a number of countries in Africa because of the chaotic conditions there.  So chaotic that they were willing to risk it all, by attempting to cross deep waters while crammed into boats.  Crammed enough that some died merely from the conditions in the boat.  In one boat that had about 150 people, rescuers found 29 bodies--10 men and 19 women.

Yet, we continue to be focused on the candidate and his penis.

Have we no sense of shame and decency?  Have we become so devoid of empathy, and so captivated by one man's penis show?

In an interview with National Public Radio, the photographer who took those photos had this to say:

the number may never go down if we as a Western society, we don't do something to stop all this conflict and war in their countries. We have the responsibility of what's happening there because maybe we don't help or we - you know, there is something that we could do better to help this situation.

What is that "better" that we can do?  I know one thing we could have done better--we could have made sure that we brought forward a candidate who would not put on a penis show.  That itself could have helped us think about, and discuss, some of the global priorities.  We could have attempted to understand how the candidates differ in their understanding of the issues and the policy ideas they have.  Instead, we have had nothing but a pornographic political theatre.

I have to make my own peace in all these.  I made a donation to my favorite humanitarian group--Doctors Without Borders.  In the grand scheme of things, my donation will not make a damn difference.  But, a man has got to do what a man has got to do.

And, even though a stranger mocks me in her email--in response to my latest newspaper column--all I can do is wish for world peace, fully recognizing my insignificant place in this political landscape.

This, too, shall pass. Unfortunately!

As we were enjoying the tastiest Morrocan sweets and the freshest strawberries, I paused.  "I know I say this a lot, but I want to remind ourselves about the awesome life that we have. With such food in plenty. On a great summer evening."

I am immensely thankful for the life that I have.  If ever I forget how lucky I am, all it takes is one visit to any of my favorite news sites to re-calibrate.

Contrast my life to the life of the kid in this photo:

Source

Even without knowing any backstory, any normal human being with a little empathy would feel terrible for that kid.  A kid with a name and a tragic backstory:

The boy, identified by medical workers as Omran Daqneesh, 5, was pulled from a damaged building after a Syrian government or Russian airstrike in the northern city of Aleppo.

How awful!

Maybe it was his haircut, long and floppy up top; or his rumpled T-shirt showing the Nickelodeon cartoon character CatDog; or his tentative, confused movements in a widely circulated video — gestures familiar to anyone who has loved a child. Or the instant and inescapable question of whether a parent was left alive to give him a hug.
In any event, by Thursday morning, Omran’s image had been broadcast and published around the world

We might share the image and the news. I blog about it. We talk about the kid and the war.  But, the killings continue.  A civil war that has dragged on for years.  Not only have we been witness to the horrors, we do not even want to help those who are fleeing from this hell.

Here in the US, we even have a presidential candidate who proudly vows that his America will not help the refugees--and there are tens of millions of my fellow citizens who even more proudly cheer him and his rhetoric!  We cannot expect any sympathy from that wannabe leader of the free world--after all, he couldn't even stand a crying kid at his rally!

Normal decent humans, unlike that candidate and his followers, will relate to this Syrian kid.

Omran, as he is carried from a damaged building in the dark, could be Everychild. He looks around in confusion, his chubby forearm draped trustingly across the reflective stripe on his rescuer’s back, before he is plopped into the chair at the back of ambulance, lit blindingly white.
He settles into a thousand-yard stare, apparently too stunned to cry. Then he puts a hand to his bloody brow, looks at his palm in surprise, and tries to wipe it on the chair. Then he glances around, as if trying to understand where he is. 

But, it is not as if photographs of kids catalyzed us into humanitarian efforts.  Remember this?

Our lives will continue.  We will have good food. Spend evenings with friends and family.  Go on vacations. Complain about the choppy cellphone signal.  Cry over the sports team that lost.

Meanwhile, adults and kids will continue to die in the brutal civil war:

Cases like Omran’s are a daily sight in eastern Aleppo, several doctors said, but he was lucky in that he made it to a hospital that was still open. ...
A boy lay on the floor, his legs missing. A woman in black put her hand to her mouth in anguish.
Another boy lay on a gurney, soaked in blood, as a clinician worked on him. A few minutes later came another text message: The boy had died. His name was Ibrahim Hadiri, and there was a new photograph of his face, eyes closed. It is not likely to go viral.

If you prick us, do we not bleed?

It is easy to dish out philosophical advice and comfort to others upon whom the cosmos might have showered misfortunes.  When a death happens but in a different home, we trot out all the platitudes.  The believers might even say things like "your loved one is now with god" or "god's will hath no why."

In the old country, there is an expression: தனக்கு பட்டால் தான் தெரியும், which translates to something like "you will truly understand it only when it happens to you."  When, for instance, a death happens in our own home--even if it is the death of beloved dog--we cry and sob just like how the neighbor did and we forget all those philosophical platitudes that we dished out to the neighbor.

It is one thing when such events happen at a personal, individual level, but, another when an entire country is going through an upheaval that I cannot even begin to imagine in my wildest imaginations.  I am referring to Syria here.  When the war and the killings unfolded in Syria, all those over the past few years apparently mattered less to us compared to when the horrific killings happened in our own home, in Paris:

Monuments around the world lit up in the colors of the French flag; presidential speeches touted the need to defend “shared values;” Facebook offered users a one-click option to overlay their profile pictures with the French tricolor, a service not offered for the Lebanese flag. On Friday the social media giant even activated Safety Check, a feature usually reserved for natural disasters that lets people alert loved ones that they are unhurt; they had not activated it the day before for Beirut.
“When my people died, no country bothered to light up its landmarks in the colors of their flag,” Elie Fares, a Lebanese doctor, wrote on his blog. “When my people died, they did not send the world into mourning. Their death was but an irrelevant fleck along the international news cycle, something that happens in those parts of the world.”
The implication, numerous Lebanese commentators complained, was that Arab lives mattered less

That was after a double suicide attack in Beirut only a day before the Paris tragedy.  A city that was finally becoming calm and peaceful after years of unrest, and despite all the chaos next door in Syria that was pushing out refugees into Lebanon.

“Imagine if what happened in Paris last night would happen there on a daily basis for five years,” said Nour Kabbach, who fled the heavy bombardment of her home city of Aleppo, Syria, several years ago and now works in humanitarian aid in Beirut.
“Now imagine all that happening without global sympathy for innocent lost lives, with no special media updates by the minute, and without the support of every world leader condemning the violence,” she wrote on Facebook.

I want to be very clear here, before some troll thinks that I am minimizing the tragedy in Paris--I am not, and these two posts make that very clear.

"All of these tragedies are "an attack on all of humanity," writes this commentator, who points out how the media even reported the events very differently:

Although the terrorist group behind the attacks in Paris and Beirut was the same, the Western media narrative has been vastly different. In Paris, ISIS attacked the city's progressive youth, massacring dozens enjoying their night out at a concert, a soccer game and a restaurant. In Beirut, ISIS struck a "Hezbollah stronghold" in the "southern suburbs of Beirut," a poor, majority Shia area often characterized as a bastion of terrorism in the region. The attack was portrayed as little more than strategic punishment for Hezbollah's ongoing involvement in the Syrian civil war and support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

As much as we are shocked and sad about the Paris attacks, don't we need to think about other places too where the same ISIS has made daily life a hell on earth?  Shouldn't what we feel for Paris and France be the same as what we feel for Aleppo and Syria?  For Beirut and Lebanon?  For Baghdad and Iraq?  for ...

It seems like we have forgotten this part that Shakespeare wrote:

If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh?
if you poison us, do we not die? 

But want to remember only the lines that come after that:

and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

Caption at the source:
The relatives of one of the victims of the twin suicide attacks in Beirut mourned
during a funeral procession in the city's Burj al-Barajneh neighborhood.