You don’t have to raise your voice against injustice, but at least show sympathy for others and feel the difference between right and wrong.
Imagine a woman with grey hair, brown skin which seems to have been burned due to remaining most of her time in the open sun; and her gloomy eyes in which one can easily spot out agony, anguish, and suffering!
She is old; her back is bowed. It signals as if she is carrying the weight of never-ending miserable moments. She walks slowly with the help of a stick. She is holding a frame of his handsome son’s picture.
She is in line waiting for someone to take her to the dead bodies where she is supposed to identify her son. Dead bodies that are mutilated, deformed, decomposed, and beyond recognition. However, despite the fact that she might not recognize, she is still there to see her son’s dead body. She asks people in her trembling voice to resemble her son’s picture with dead bodies.
Imagine the horror she goes through in those moments, the moments when she just hopes that any of the dead bodies is not her son’s. But hope fades away as she sees the clothes he was wearing when he left home – the only identity remaining is clothes. She falls down and bursts into tears as she recognizes the clothes. Just imagine the pain she undergoes to see the deformed face of her sunshine.
Can you still not imagine and feel the pain of the old woman?
Remember the nightmares that you must have undergone when you see that your loved one is dead and you wake up crying from sleep, and you cry so hard that you feel your existence is trembling and restless. And you cannot stop weeping.
However, you get a wave of relief when you realize that it was just a dream, a bad dream. Now imagine again that broken old woman, her rest of life is now a nightmare that you might have experienced in your life. Isn’t the loss of loved ones the worst thing to handle in one’s life?
I want to understand those extreme feelings that compel a human to torture other humans to death, to take his nails out, to drill the person’s body as if he was working on a sculpture. What would be the motives that made him so stone-hearted? How would he justify these killings?
Even if they were “evil,” how can something positive be expected as a consequence of such unspeakable negativity?
If it is for peace, what kind of peace would such brutal killings bring when restless souls are around? If it is for the rights of people, how would the people justify the rights of these human beings who are tortured, killed like insects and left to be decomposed?
As a human being, I humbly request that the Karachi-based human rights activist Abdul Sattar Edhi help raise more awareness of this serious issue and to convince the killers to bring the bodies to coffins before they decompose. It is really hard for families to recognize their loved ones. How can old mothers and fathers holding their son’s pictures in their hands identify the pictures with the decomposed parts and identify them?
Edhi, come forward, please! Your coffins would not bring life to the dead but would at least bring solace to parents because they would finally be able to identify their children.
For the rest of the readers of this article, I humbly request that you don’t just read the news to update your information or Facebook status. Read them and feel the sufferings of others around you. You don’t have to raise your voice against injustice, but at least show sympathy for others and feel the difference between right and wrong. Don’t ignore such news pretending to be neutral citizens.
Martin Luther King, Jr. summed up this sentiment like this:
“Cowardice asks the question – is it safe? Expediency asks the question – is it politic? Vanity asks the question – is it popular? But conscience asks the question – is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.”
Rahila Umer Sumalani is a Fulbright scholar, with an MS degree from The University of Georgia, Athens. She is currently working as Assistant Professor at the Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering and Management Science.
