Can we forget? By Oroba Tasnim Siddiqui

I have never been at a loss of words, nor have I ever felt this great an amount of grief. Probably because I accept death as a blatant reality that surrounds everyone at one point or the other and to shy away from such a hardening fact is as I believe, grave injustice indeed.

Yet nothing, neither lessons of fate and destiny nor the ‘logic’ of violence and inhumane activities even for a second lets me come to terms with this tragedy.

It is far beyond the rails of tragedy, or disasters or what we call catastrophes, it is further than that.

Because as events unroll, we ultimately forget about them, in a matter of days, or weeks or at the most a few months, nothing takes toll until we in fact become the victims.

And such incidents where the weakest of the society are asked to become the bravest, that is the boiling point where it all melts, and we’re unable to digest it so we make false assumptions based on the past.

Yes, it will heal, yes we will forget, and yes it will be okay.

But I ask myself how can we be so sure? Afterall there are still so many questions unanswered, and so many queries even if we wanted to, we couldn’t answer.

How will we really move on without these answers?

Will we be able to explain to the surviving warriors why we failed them over and over again even after their friends sacrificed themselves for us?

How will we reassure their families that nothing like this will ever happen again? That when they next send their child to school, they will return home in clothes of sweat and not of blood.

How will we console the mother who shouted at her child for being late for school and never got the chance to hug him back or the child who lost his mother because she was too passionate for her students to see them die in front of her?

How can we as a nation move on, having learnt nothing from our children, our brave, gallant children who did not once look back and instead faced the scene of trauma headlong every time they had to.

Did we really think posting facebook updates or twitter trends would atone for the blood that spilled for so many? Or creating endless committees that have never come up with any solutions byfar, prove a solace to those grieving? Or perhaps visiting the schools once to ‘bolster’ their spirits would be enough?

No, we’re wrong. And the greatest tragedy through it all is the fact that we will remain wrong until and unless we feel it through to our heart, and change, make amends in ourselves and for once forget about all the things that divide us but instead gaze upon all the signs of unity in front of us, Islam, Pakistan, humanity.

Because if we do not see that now, we are just preparing our children for sacrifice and a nation that abandons its own children in the darkness of evil is in fact a nation destined for the lowest of the pits.

'Me aesi qom se hoon jisskay wo bachon se darta hay

Bara dushman bana phirta hay jo bachon se larta hay'

by webmaster@insaf.pk (tkiadmin)