Haunted

I saw this word in the newspaper today; and it scared the daylights out of me. One minute you're yawning away the remnants of a cozy slumber and the next you're sitting stiff in your chair, a sort of stifling darkness creeping up in the air, with the word gently throbbing in your brain like a fading echo. Know the feeling?

That's the word reporters used to describe the probable future of all the flooded places in Pakistan. Right now they were a mass of swimming arms and legs being crushed and carried by the current, but soon, judging by the rate at which people were evacuating, nothing would be left but a few streamers of cloth and many many unmarked graves.

But I can think of a better word: cursed. I think the whole lot of us are cursed. Cursed with pain and cursed with such thick skin. So many horrible things have happened in the past couple of years to other Muslims, to fellow countrymen. To innocent people like Dr. Afia Siddiqui and all the people of Iraq who never did have those much flaunted WMDs. It's happening to the people of Palestine and Israel constantly. And yet I always feel like the pain of these events is isolated only to those with whom it's happening. We shudder to think about the holocaust which was years ago yet we can't conjure up those same feelings for what's happening in the present, in front of our very eyes.

That's not to say I am doing very much to help these people. I'm in the same boat (or perhaps even in a more damaged one) as you guys. It's just that I have this opinion that, at the very very least, news like this should make your heart sink. Does it make your heart sink? Maybe it does for you, and you and you too. But obviously not for all of us. Because if that were true things like these wouldn't even be happening.

I read this book the other day in which a magistrate sentenced a man to execution. The magistrate's son watched as the man himself swung the sword that beheaded the criminal. The boy was repulsed and his father looked equally sickened but he told his son that that was necessary. It was necessary that he kill the man with his own hands because "...If you would take a man's life you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die."

--quote taken from 'Game of Thrones' by George R. R. Martin