Why

Life has become cheap. You need to make a point, just shoot a few people point blank! Or even better blow them sky high! Makes a louder sound and a bigger impact! Or just hold their heads by the hair and chop them off! Burning them alive is not a bad option. Want to create a bigger sensation? Just derail a train here or hijack a plane there and bang it into a tall building in broad daylight! And all this because you want to LIVE in a changed world which you think is ideal for you and a few others like you. The change you seek to implement may vary from political beliefs to religious fanaticism. You might have just thought the world will be a better place without that man who was walking by hand in hand with another man, and you just hit him with a baseball bat and killed him on the sidewalk! Or, you might have felt that you did not like that particular skin colour of that woman and so you raped her and slit her throat. Or you just cut off someone’s tongue because he stammered! Well, everyone gets the picture. The media loves you. They love it when you go trigger happy or blow up a few things! They get their headlines! And you get your opportunity to advertise your cause, ‘I want…’ you scream!

We have heard enough about your demands, your wants and your causes for rationalising your thirst for blood and more blood… for spreading this reign of terror that we live in. We have been numbed, our tolerance level has stretched and we have become indifferent to human suffering and that’s why every time you have to make an even bigger bang than the last, to shake us up! This game can continue till the world comes to an end! But what we forget is you are a part of us too. You are within us.
We are killing our own.

We are in a situation very close to something described by Martin Niemoller, a relatively high profile opponent of the Nazis, about the holocaust. He reportedly said:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me--
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Which sums up to say that those of us who think, ‘It happens to others and not us!’, are living in a fool’s paradise. Who knows, a loved one might be writing my memorial tomorrow and posting it on this blog because I got blown away while buying vegetables for lunch at my local market! So, it is time now to listen to those voices which we have rudely silenced. We have to know about those innumerable lives which we have snuffed out, before their time. We have to know them as us, people of flesh and blood. We have to know what they meant to their loved ones. We have to feel their loss. We need to ask ourselves, ‘why they deserved to die while we are still alive?’ We need to find ourselves in them.

We do not know if this blog will create any movement or change lives, but it will surely provide a decent space for us to offer our regards, prayers and love to those whose lives were indecently terminated.