Staying human around terrorism

I wonder how many of us now consider bomb blasts just another inconvenience. Just another uncomfortable incident that has happened to someone else, someone we didn't know or care about. The death tolls keep rising. One below 30 is considered minor, nothing significant. If you need attention, you have to kill at least a 100 these days. Every news channel runs the same story, the same grotesque images over and over again. Journalists and reporters interviewing injured people, asking them what they feel about the incident. People like us watching back home can read the silence in their eyes, but the reporters can't. People avenging their murdered loved ones by killing other people's loved ones. It's almost like we have ceased to be human. One stops before even starting to make sense of the world around them. After five minutes of coverage, a reporter repeats 'So and so channel was the first channel to bring you this exclusive news.' Their insensitivity disgusts me. How they manage to think money while people die makes me lose faith in the world.

I remember the Marriot blasts. It had followed many before it aswell, except this time I felt uneasy. I said to myself 'these people are one of us.' I am ashamed, for it took a blast that killed the rich, for me to realise that much was wrong around us. As if the poor, who die everyday, are anything but one of us. They are less human with lesser rights to exist and live a full life.

I could not utter a single word for an entire day after the Islamic university blasts. So many of my friend's friends had died. These were young individuals with hopes and dreams. Young girls with expressions that told a story being driven to the hospital were shown on all channels. Yet, the event wasn't brutal enough to keep students from enjoying the unexpected holidays. Facebook was full of cheerful messages about how the youth had decided to spend these days off. People are dying. It's about time you start caring.

I recall a Bob Dylan song in which he sings 'How many deaths will it take till we see, that too many people have died? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.' Joseph Stalin put it in words that make us cringe; 'One death is a tragedy, a million are just statistics'. Close your eyes and think about it. There are stories behind every single death; A women with a young child waiting at home, A boy engaged to be married, A grandfather who loves his grandhchildren, An only child studying to save her family from the slums. Who are we to treat them all like a figure. They are gone. Their loved ones will never see them again. never. We don't have the right to forget about them the next day. We don't deserve to move on.

I sit here thinking, there is nothing I can do. I can sit at home and wait it out while students just like me are being killed. It can happen to you, and to me. The one thing you can do is hope. You can hope that innocent civilians cease to pay the price for the mistakes of their leaders