Operation De-Frost: For Burma (and For You)
You know, I usually like to start my posts off with some wry joke or some cynical/sarcastic comment that I mostly use to point out the glaringly obvious.
But I’m not going to do that now.
At a time when thousands of innocent people are getting massacred purely based upon their choice to worship whatever they willingly choose to worship, I am absolutely paralyzed with sadness over the images and the news updates that I have been inundated with in the last week or so.
I don’t know where to start discussing the ongoing, government backed, grossly huge racial and religious cleansing that has been plaguing the Muslim community in Mynamar, Burma.
Now, even as a Muslim, I don’t really care about the fact that these innocent souls are Muslim souls. They could worship cow manure for all I care. What I care about and what is wrenching me down to the pit of my stomach is fact that entire masses of people are being hunted down, abducted, burned, and downright massacred due to the fact that they happened to worship whatever the hell they wanted.
It’s not a revolution or a political uprising or some sort of governmental stifling of public demonstrations of contempt. It’s a purely racial and religious annihilation that has now numbered in the thousands over a mere number of days.
And, the scariest part of this whole ordeal is that, for some reason, it has not been stopped. Even worse, no one has made an attempt to stop it.
As someone who watches and reads the news, is constantly plugged into the social network, and is, basically, faced with an endless string of information throughout the day, I am overwhelmed with a sharply paralyzing anger at the fact that I simply don’t know how I can help.
I mean, you hear about people getting blown off the face of the earth, children dieing of cancer, and the entire world is basically going down the toilet, and what the hell can you really do?
You can’t help but watch Ramadan TV shows, discuss less pressing subjects (over which you feel you can exert some control), and go on and on tweeting, posting, Instagraming about yourself and your life in order to create a distraction from the things you know are more important but that, at the end of the day, you can’t do squat about.
You dream away the guilt and convince yourself that, because you’re not a president or a politician or a celebrity or a millionaire, you are helpless. So you have the right to forget about all the horrible, scary things because, hey, what can you really do, right?
And you’re right. The overwhelming truth is that there is very little power in the hands of most people on this planet. We can donate to charities, sign petitions, and tweet about it all day long, but the reality is that a normal individual (or a handful of normal people) probably isn’t going to be able to incur a groundbreaking change in any part of the world that is outside their local sphere.
And yet here I am, writing this post for Burma. Actually, I’m writing it for myself just as much as I am for them.
Because I want to remind myself that I’ve still got a conscience. I want to remind myself that even when its okay to be a part of the big, powerful machine that’s all about ‘Me! Me! Me!’ that this does not give me an excuse to become the emotional equivalent of a dried up fruit cake.
It CAN’T be that easy to see thousands of people getting killed so mercilessly for their religious beliefs and then just brush it off because ‘OH MY GOD LOOK HOW MANY LIKES A PICTURE OF MY DESSERT GOT!’
So, Burma, this post is my ode to you. It’s probably not worth much because its only coming from me, but this is my promise: you are not forgotten. Even when I do all the pointlessly narcissistic things that I do, you are still in my thoughts.
In fact, you are in many people’s thoughts. No one’s too busy to care about you. Most of us have just kept our hearts in the freezer for a while.
And we need to defrost.
So I urge you to please show your support and your voice for Burma. Even if you’re just an up and coming blogger like me. If you have any platform at all use it EVEN JUST ONCE to give these people that no one’s even trying to help some kind of outreach.
Do it for them. But also do it for you.
All my love!
