The standup comedian expresses her views on the tragic killing of school students in Pakistan in her column
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.”
Maybe because of how commonly they are quoted, but the opening lines of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities are intrinsically humanity in a single paragraph. In writing class, it was considered all too often quoted to mean, just about anything.
126 students were killed in a hostage crisis in an Army school in Peshawar by religious extremists in cold blood. The news leaked out of our TV and laptop screens in terrified tweets and interviews of parents pleading with the killers to stop. When the most primal instinct of an animal is to survive and propagate its species, the day we turn against our own young with such malice is the day that seems like the beginning of the end. We stared straight into the gaping maw of the beast that we ourselves have created a toxic mixture of politics, religion and a dose of inhumanity. Our news channels didn’t even have to resort to histrionics and looped footage because reality has surpassed our own hysteria. And what is the religion of childhood? What God does a child know of when it hears him being praised moments before he is killed?
The day before that, an allegedly lone-acting religious extremist held a café in Sydney hostage. As the crisis continued the streets experienced with incidents of religious disharmony almost immediately. After watching a woman on the subway tearfully remove her hijab for the fear of being targetted, Rachel Jacobs walked upto her and told her to “put it back on, I’ll ride with you.” The #IllRideWIthYou hashtag trended for days. It’s the kind of stuff Buzzfeed can only dream of and only in reality, in it’s own messed up way, can produce. Religion is about Kindness and humanity BUT kindness and humanity surpasses and knows no religion.
And like it is always the tendency of the human mind to want to tie everything into one neat bow of understanding- you search for meaning. You struggle to impose a framework of what is good/bad/right/wrong. In two days we had, as Charles Dickens said “Everything before us, we had nothing before us.”
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