This is for the rest of us. The rest of us who survived.
As a parent, it devastates me to think what terror-stricken families are going through tonight. I worry about how they will ever be whole and healed again. The passing away of any family member is hard, but passing away because of an act of violence is hard to justify as the divine plan.
I wonder and shudder at the generations to come and how I think that they will be an innocence-less generation. All the technological and medical breakthroughs will help them excel faster and quicker, without the slow streaming Internet and the 100rs-a-minute international calls. However will more information lead to better decisions? And what about innocence? Without innocence how will this generation be silly enough to dream dreams that most people call foolish? Can greatness prevail without this innocence?
My son is a year old and fortunately he doesn’t comprehend what is happening all around the World. The grief, the trauma and the pain, all because some frustrated men need an excuse to kill? The new generation is being born into a world of unnatural motivations and greed. It worries me to think that since the day they were conceived, terror looms in backdrop. We may sanitize the world for them, but they sense and will soon know that behind our version there lies the World as it is, terrorized.
Will this mean that this generation will have high tolerance to terror? Will acts of terror not move them the way that they move us now? Will they not shudder because they are more used to it? I may take heart in the fact, just for a moment that what makes us human –our humanity – will echo throughout the generations to come, no matter what their exposure has been. But today, I am of the opinion that the meaning of humanity is subjective.
It is true that man is his own worst enemy, even before he becomes the enemy of who-he-is-not. Being human may be overestimated is what I feel today. There is no pride or nobility in being human. There is more sacredness in being an animal today. We need to think about how our generation will be defined in history – will we just be the mere survivors of violence? It is a sad day and a day to think about how violence pervades our family, whether we are directly affected by it or not.