The right to grief
I don’t know what is wrong with some people, but it is absolutely driving me crazy. There has been a trend lately that seems to suggest that unless I strongly feel about something that concerns me or my nation first, then I have no right feeling sorry for something outrageous and tragic happening in a different country.
I witnessed this again today when some blessed soul questioned a friend over his outrage over what is going on between Israel and Gaza, while little girls are being brutally raped and murdered in our own backyards. Keeping names out of this, I somehow feel that a human being is capable of expressing anger and outrage over more than one thing while being genuinely concerned about all the issues at hand.
Did I miss some memo that prohibits people from caring about more than one thing? Did someone take a vote in my absence and it was unanimously decided that human beings had the emotional range of a teaspoon and therefore should only focus their efforts on one thing at a time?
How dare you tell me that just because I chose to speak about a major issue that deserves international attention, that I am insensitive to something as heartbreaking and inhumane as rape?
Who gave you the moral authority to tell anyone what they chose to spend their time discussing is correct or not? And even more importantly, why is it that you think that the right way to draw attention towards your cause is by demeaning another’s? Are you really that vile that you feel that the death of a child is not just as gut-wrenching as the rape of another child?
Worse yet, these people take great pleasure in showing up a few days after the said event, and mock people for having moved on to something else. The public memory is fickle, they say. Yes, it is. Eventually we move on from the deaths of the people who were the closest to us. I know I did, and it is more than likely that you did as well. Are you really going to fault me for trying to not surround myself with misery every waking moment of my life? What kind of hell are you living in if you think that any moment that you spend not thinking about your terrible loss is a great and unpardonable crime?
Scary as it may seem, people really do that. If they were just trolls, trying to bait people into frothing all over the internet, it would have been, to some degree, understandable. But these are otherwise logically sound people, some even people who I have looked up to in the past. Is there a point to this madness? Is this even something that should have happened in the first place? This is not some football match for god’s sake, where you are quibbling over team loyalty and mocking football fans because they support a team that has nothing to do with their country. How does it matter if I have never been to Egypt or Ukraine or Nigeria? As a human being who found out about the hellish conditions there, am I not allowed to express my disbelief and grief over such a tragedy?
Lives are at stake, and the count gets higher every day, and you are too busy riding on your high horse, an imaginary sword in your hand, mowing down all those who you perceive as the enemy to your cause. Go back to the hell hole you came from. Leave us fickle armchair activists be. Maybe I will feel bad about the death of someone today, and come tomorrow, maybe I will laugh at something funny that a random person on the internet said. But one thing I will not do is to question your right to feel something and say what you want about it.
A slightly modified version of this post was first published on Campus Ghanta
