My Thoughts VI - Continuing with Journal entries
Jul. 1st, 2006
I watched a Fifth Estate documentary a while back, on the Muslim Toronto 18 Jihadi kids who got busted by CSIS and I was somewhat disappointed. The disappointment comes from the observation that the issue at hand is still not understood.
I am not Muslim, not religious at all in fact but I am perhaps cursed because I feel the pain of others. Tears drop when I see children’s bodies being carried away from restaurants and streets in Israel when some suicide bomber decides to strike – it is so wrong – words cannot explain it! Then, as the news permits, another clip of children dying of starvation in Africa will come on and the tears keep flowing. I cannot calmly think about how millions of Palestinians have lived in refugee camps for decades and decades now. And I have stated before that if I was born as a Native American here in Canada, I would have in the best scenario light myself on fire on the stairs of the Parliament building in protest towards the fact that Native people live in shacks without access to potable water in way too many cases.
The unfairness of this world cannot be tolerated any longer. Things have to change! And it is not us, ‘the younger’ people that are going crazy – it is the ‘older’ people that are crazy for letting the world come to where it is. So, this is the issue that needs to be resolved: the state of things in the world – not the sanity of the youth, that will come when all else is good.
As a Canadian citizen I am ashamed to be part of a society that provides material and human support for illegal and immoral wars while ignoring the fact that its own citizens do not have affordable housing and that one in six children is living in poverty. We are all guilty for such things because we allow it. And if an Afghan blew himself up in traffic beside me on the highway tomorrow, well I suppose in a really messed up way I deserve it. It really should not come to that but we allow it by things we do, or do not do.
I know people who do not care about politics, voting, foreign affairs and the like. I argue with such people about how their inaction really means an acceptance: acceptance that people should freeze on subway vents in the winter, acceptance that innocent civilians are killed by the bullets we manufacture and so on. Therefore, we are not as harmless as we pose ourselves to be – actually we are quite scummy especially because there is so much we can do as a people but we do not.
