“It remains unclear who was responsible for this atrocity,” was the very last update I remember reading in Reddit’s live-feed coverage of the brutality that was inflicted on a hapless group of diners at an upmarket restaurant in Dhaka’s diplomatic zone last night.
Trying to pin down a motive, I wracked my brain for every possibility -- from crackpot theories of a disgruntled team of 99-percenters exacting some kind of perverse symbolic revenge on the third-world bourgeoisie, to the more obvious scenario of the more egregious followers of the religion of peace continuing to not do the one thing they don’t know how to: Practice what they preach.
Like you, I too have read news reports about the gay bar shooting in Orlando from last month and gone about my day like it was nothing. I too remember finding myself in discussions about the recent abhorrent suicide-bombing of an airport in Istanbul and absent-mindedly nodding in agreement of how “hateful” and “cowardly” the perpetrators must have been to be able to do something like that.
What I really should have been doing is counting the number of bodies it would take before an atrocity of this magnitude eventually affected me personally.
I don’t know if it was divine intervention or just the attackers’ schedule for me to be thankful of, but had they launched their attack an hour or two earlier, I probably would have lost my brother and my sister-in-law today. I don’t expect you to empathise with me, lord knows I sure as hell wouldn’t have if it happened to someone else.
No, what I expect you to do is understand something: You see, there is a certain sanctity to human life, because it never exists in a vacuum. Everybody is someone’s son or daughter, after all. Take away one life, and it invariably affects an entire tree-worth of other lives.
In living our lives, we are all looking for answers to innumerable questions: “Who am I?” “Why are we here?” “Why do I starve when others enjoy a hot meal three times a day?” “Whose beliefs are right and whose are wrong?” And, appropriately enough, there is an infinite number of ways in which we can try to get our answers.
If you are someone who has been wronged, I beg you to not reach for the gun, and understand that adversity is a core element that helps us become stronger individuals
Except two.
You know the old movie cliché “violence is never the answer?” Turns out Hollywood writers were right after all. The only answers that violence and death can get you are to questions about your own self.
And yet, it feels like that’s all I see in the headlines these days. What is the world even coming to?
It’s been confirmed by now that the attackers were indeed Islamist hardliners -- they spared any hostages who were able to successfully cite the Qur’an -- the defining line that separates those who believe from those who don’t.
But does knowing that really change anything? At least 20 people lost their lives and countless others were gravely injured. Will information about the attackers’ motives do anything to bring those lost souls back to their families or justify the lifetime of trauma imparted on the ones lucky enough to survive?
Consider this my plea for human life then: If you find yourself questioning your own existence, please drop the knife, get off of your preferred social network, and try to realise that we don’t live our lives through others but for them.
If you are someone who has been wronged, I beg you to not reach for the gun, and understand that adversity is a core element that helps us become stronger individuals.
And if you feel like your faith, your very belief, has been questioned by someone else, well, I just hope you realise that swords and machetes are incredibly inefficient killing tools in the modern world, and that beliefs are always temporary, the questioning of which is what eventually helps us get the answers we seek.
My condolences to anyone affected by yesterday’s attack.
