Like many of my friends, I am also a student. Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I read an article that has stuck in my mind ever since. Its message was simple: "Nowhere in today's world can we live happy lives while at the same time, in another part of it, reactionary, militant despots plot and plan against humanity and civility from their dens".
'Koorosh Afshar' (pseudonym for a student in Tehran) at tompaine.com{leaving aside the impending empirical US/Israeli phagocytosis of Iran, with its inevitable slurry of propaganda and slag, just that one simple message sticks out, "Nowhere in today's world..."
link from TomTomorrow
ok, so you aren't supposed to get all groovy just because your belly full when they hungry right? that's the idea?
there's something wrong with that, let's find it.
try it from this perspective:
as long as anyone is suffering we can't be happy. how's that?
the idea that as long as someone else is (fill in the blank) hungry oppressed ill trod-upon you name it, then I'm supposed to not be happy.
in other words, let's remove happiness from the world until everyone feels better.
how can you laugh when someone in New Delhi is right now dying?
it's supposed to make you care, make you act, make you act out of guilt, make you feel hypocritical and selfish, but you know what it really does? it doesn't push people toward compassion. that kind of nonsense pushes people toward heartlessness, because they can recognize the wrongness of it, the inhuman limitation of it, though they may not understand why it's wrong. and they'll reject it, and they'll go on to reject anything having to do with compassion. I think that's called backfiring.
what I see there is the partial assumption of godhood, the wearing of a mask of divinity, the all-seeing mask, the all-knowing mask, and the all-powerful, but none of the heart, none of the grave responsibility and the deep sadness of the truly divine, contemplating something as flawed and incomplete as humanity.}
