The News –
What have we done to deserve this? Huge as our faults may be, what have we done to deserve the combined intellects of the Sharifs and Imran Khan? There is no escaping the fact that we chose them with our own hands, anointed them with our approval. But this circumstance, if anything, only further emphasises the poverty of our circumstances…the narrow choices available to a nation with such grandiose pretensions: Fortress of Islam, God’s chosen kingdom, etc. We are close to becoming a monument to insanity and yet ascribe our creation to the fulfilment of a divine purpose.
Anger is a spent force in Pakistan, an exhausted emotion. We are past its boundaries because many of us feel that nothing really matters, nothing will change. This is our destiny.
We are no strangers to horror. We have known it in all shapes and sizes. Churches have been attacked before, mosques desecrated, the innocent killed and maimed, all in the name of Islam. The march of extremism, and now virtually the triumph of extremism, the retreat of tolerance and good sense, we have seen and experienced all this. So there is nothing new on this front. One more outrage: it only adds to the list, creates nothing new.
The despair comes from something else: the nation directionless, its leaders acting like lost souls, afraid of their own shadows, covering themselves in layers of security that even Genghis Khan would have found excessive, feeling little, understanding even less, closing their eyes to reality, by their attitude conceding space to the forces of darkness, yet all the while pompous as if they hold the key to the riddles of the universe.
