What’s so new about it?

By Maheen A. Rashdi

It’s funny how it creeps up on us each time. Come December, the inevitable reaction never changes; “Where has the year gone…how time flies...”
I don’t think time flies. It moves pretty excruciatingly if you ask me. Especially if you are carefully watching it go, examining each moment laced with its share of agony and ecstasy.
As the old year continues its stealthy approach to the finish line, we are left feeling stripped of a last chance to achieve some vague unformed goal which we don’t even remember. There’s just an irritating, nagging feeling that there are things left undone and life has again snatched another year from the days of our lives.
Most of us have often wished life came with a user’s manual and a set of instructions to at least keep our basic routines in correct order, you know, like you have on bus doors in most western countries;
1)Wait for green light;
2) Push to open door;
3) Step out;
4) Clear door and walk!
Seriously! Like the governments of immigrant societies, God too should have estimated that we are too dumb too manage this precious world of His without prior experience. HE should have sent each one of us with an easy to follow instruction manual ranging from the very basic to the profound. Well, yes, he has tried to send us messages at least 0.14 million times but we are not only too forgetful but totally self absorbed to remember any of his detailed directives.
So if there was an easy set of rules, we could make the new-year’s resolution accordingly and life would be so simple – just like doing spring cleaning. For example;
Jan 1 – put kids in the washer and remember to turn on drier to very hot.
Jan 2 – send husband to garage for servicing / tuning.
Jan 3 – get new salary with the new year – do not settle for No, as an answer.
….etc, etc.

That however, just takes care of the basics. It is near impossible to even attempt to create a formula to solve the more complex dilemmas ruling and ruining our peace. How to deal with the senseless terror controlling our subconscious? How to harvest hope in a hopeless world where the only thing rising is the murder statistics? How to annihilate the annihilation of nations by greedy marauders. How to resurrect the concept of peace and humanity?
While looking at life’s funny side up may at times be the only way to get through its gruesome reality, at certain moments no amount of wit can come to your rescue. When the news flash reports the death of a 17-year-old soldier in Afghanistan on Christmas day or the killing of school children in Gaza – humour can’t stop the tears or the curses at the insane desires which generate such human anguish.
Our world has been taken over by megalomaniacs lusting for global domination. Alas, if it were just that simple to blame all wars on someone else and distance ourselves from the many Azam Amir Kasabs breeding their own brand of hate. But in this ‘connected’ era where not just the virtual world of airwaves, but multicultural societies around the globe are creating a new amalgamated civilization, maintaining neutrality becomes risky business. It is neither easy to distance ourselves from the Kasab types who sully a religion, nor is there any desire to display rabid nationalism and join the war chants of our country of origin.
It is a tough call for such ‘global citizens’ not siding with either enemy lines when war cries from their homes become an imminent threat. As we have established that there is no easy step by step guide to refer to when such earth shattering situations arise, life becomes wrought with anxiety and fear.
I used to believe that taking a general oath of allegiance to peace and living a humane life might be the answer for global harmony. But this naiveté won’t work anymore.
Our roots WILL always define us, our final character and in turn our final act.
Professor Timothy Gianotti who chairs the Islamic Studies department of York University and is a scholar of comparative religions gave an interesting perspective in his Eid khutba delivered at a local Toronto mosque just days after the Mumbai carnage. In his opinion, alienating ourselves from such criminals who wreak terror in the name of our religion is an escapist attitude, since these are not aliens but a product of our own, man-made societies. It is for us to do some serious introspection and identify the insanity breeding such delinquents.
While it is so easy to just sit back and condemn, this really is the time to move beyond the rhetoric and answer our ‘Call’ by making ourselves active in negating the misconceptions that these waylaid travelers of a non-religion are worshipping and popularizing.
Perhaps that can become the first step in life’s user guide. To channel a way of negating hate and promoting love.
As my friend Diana pointed out to me in our last soul-search-speak, ‘Life is not too short, but too long!’ Yes, too long to live in misery created by ourselves. And there are enough natural disasters taking place to extinguish human life without the added force of gunfire, armor-piercing bullets, bombs, landmines and napalm.
But such ‘ideological speech-making’ that I am often accused of usually just remains as words in a column in a weekend magazine! And I also know that no user guide is going to descend to make life simpler for us.
It’s already been four days since we bade farewell to the last year when one of the last breaking news was the high death toll in Gaza. While this year will usher in a historical era in the White House, there is little chance of change in the death statistics of soldiers or in the collateral damage in Palestine-Israel; Kashmir, Iraq or Afghanistan.
Whether the year is new or old, their legacy of war remains unchanged. If we don’t want the statistics rising each year, going beyond drawing room discussions and getting active to change that legacy of war and hate is a necessity. And that should be a universal new-year pledge.