someone made a brilliant comment about finding it hard to mourn in these times. it’s not just that we’ve lost our humanity or our power of concentration, it’s also, at least for me, the politics of divisiveness and violence that are embedded in the mourning process itself.
i’m not just talking about paris, a beautiful city with lovely people that i visited just a few weeks ago. i am also talking about peshawar and the incomprehensibly cruel attack on a school, which killed hundreds of children. what could be more inhumane, more heartbreaking. yet, from the beginning, the language of grief in both these cases was laced with absolute binaries and the need for swift vengeance. an implicit demand was made not to talk about political context, for that would mean justifying the attacks, not to analyze the reasons put forth by the attackers themselves, for that would mean humanizing them when they must remain a pure and abstract evil.
after the peshawar attacks, my newsfeed was flooded with images of lynched men. “terror suspects must be hanged within 24 hours,” perfectly nice people commanded. a pakistani woman, holding a toddler in her profile picture, urged the pakistani army to “kill them all, kill their neighbors, kill their friends, kill anyone who gives them bread, kill anyone who offers them shelter…” she went on for an entire paragraph.
in the wake of the paris attacks, #killallmuslims became a flashpoint of western solidarity against the un-europeans, the un-free. not making pornographic cartoons of prophets would mean giving up the freedoms that “our ancestors died for” a white american friend proclaimed, in a rather mystifying way.
hate-filled mourning with self-righteous demands to eliminate the other, for our security, for our values, for our way of life (whatever human misery that way of life might be built on) is difficult to embrace. one cannot help but see the inequities and incredible violence that exist in this sacrosanct system we must protect. one cannot un-see the images of children dying of cold in gaza and syria and wonder if this is the world order we’re fighting for, if these are the “values” we need to rally around. one cannot help but see the jarring, screaming hypocrisy of it all. it’s hammered into the feel-good demonstrations of unity on the part of the free, the civilized, the ones who count. it’s impossible for some of us to add our voices to this chorus of the privileged.
i’m thankful for the many who understand these contradictions. over the past few days, once again, i’ve consolidated my friend list with clear-minded activists who are able to articulate the complexities of our times, who are swayed by justice rather than fake slogans, and who allow us to focus on the underlying political causes of the unrest we’re seeing without calling for widespread extermination. as joe sacco put it rather directly, either we learn to coexist and make the compromises that are necessary for any kind of equal human relationship or we settle once and for all the question of the other. until some other evil bursts onto the scene that is.