Just Another Degree

Today, I am not enraged or fired up or really really pissed off. I feel that way not because I am devoid of emotion or feeling but because I am of the opinion that sustained anger and revenge is not healthy for anyone.  God help us if we stand around all day with our teeth and fists clenched in rage. I am sure that we have more to give.

This situation deserves our anger but it also deserves our understanding and our faith. Our faith in the idea that good shall always prevail over evil and our belief that violence will never be the answer. A lot of you may disagree with that last part, especially today, but we all need to take a step back and process not only what has happened in the last forty eight hours, but what has happened over the past several years, because an act of terror never stands alone. It stands as a consequence of another equally horrific event. It hence, stands to reason that terror and the retaliation that follows is an endless cycle. What happened yesterday was simply one more degree out of a bloody three hundred and sixty and more will follow if we allow our fists to be clenched.  It is anger, I believe, that is the cause not the effect of terrorism, for it was someone else’s anger that caused the act in the first place. Make no mistake, we are part of this cycle, all of us who want the terrorists to die, who want to retaliate, we are all another degree. I can’t blame anyone else for being angry, because even I am angry but yet I can ask for all of us to temper our reactions and curb our initial descent into rage. “We are not them”, it is something we say with such certainty, yet if we do retaliate and take an eye for our eye, then how different are we? The truth is that we or someone else has destroyed their world just as they have destroyed ours and post this tragedy we shall find a way to destroy someone else’s. And we will be proud and we will rejoice and a child weeping somewhere in a desert will decide to make it his life’s mission to destroy us…..again. We did that, the fair and the righteous did that, us good guys did that. We destroy their world and then we ask how could anyone become a terrorist.

This may be a difficult question but let me ask it anyway. How many of you wanted to pick up a gun when you first heard that they killed people in the Taj? How many wanted revenge when you first heard that a hundred people died? How many were overjoyed when those two terrorists were killed on marine drive? This question and its answer come with no value judgment, either way we are human and all of us are the same. But, because of our humanness we are bred with a simple power known as choice. That power of choice gives us the ability to reason, to rationalize and to interpret in a million different ways. This is my interpretation of an event that deserves more than one.