Give Me a Break

I’m one of those people who can easily become obsessed with anything.  Like once I went through a time of my life where I did nothing but scrap booking.  If you know me as a person, you’d know this hobby does not in any way fit my personality but I took it on with enthusiasm and subsequently spent way too much money on stuff that go alone with such an expensive habit.  That lasted a few months, almost a year.   Then there was the jewelry making phase.  Let’s not relive that.  It was financially not such a good time for me. 

But my obsessions do not only lean towards random interests like those I mentioned above.  It extends far beyond.  If you bring up a topic in front of me and I’m fairly uneducated about it, I will spend hour’s googling and trolling the internet for information, not to be a know-it-all but for general knowledge.  A good example:  a few weeks back someone mentioned that Shirley Temple had passed on.  Ironically enough this was before she had actually moved on to the good ship Lollipop in the sky but I had been fairly sure that she had died years back.  I went back to my desk and spent a good hour researching only to find out that she was alive (at least for a few weeks more).

During the Olympics, I’m up till 2am watching every commentary under the sun regardless of if it is a school night or not.  Any presidential election is torturous because I absolutely need to know what every political Pundit has to say about anything at all.  When a disaster happens somewhere around the world, my butt is sitting on the sofa watching riveted to the TV.  Yes, I can be a media junkie however I try not to be too partial.  It’s not like I stay tuned into CNN and ignore FauxNews.  I am thorough in my ‘awareness’ which includes jumping online and seeing what bloggers have to say.  Yes, can you say ‘obsessive’?

It’s no different with this airplane that mysteriously vanished.  For days I’ve been running home, flipping on the news and watching the news cycle for hours.  Actually, once you’ve done this enough you realize how dang redundant the news truly is.  How much do these anchors get paid for saying the same thing 1000 times over the span of 1 hour?  Can I get some of that dough?  I can do that!  Heck I’ve done that, endlessly repeated myself although my audience is much smaller, pretty much just P.

But a few days ago, and I believe it was Sunday, I abruptly got ‘over’ it.  Not because I didn’t care anymore.  I can’t help but care.  It was the fact that the investigation swung from being a sad tragic event to another terrorist plot.  The plane, instead of having plunged into the sea, had instead been hijacked by the pilots and was now sitting somewhere comfortably waiting for the right time to what?  Ask for ransom?  A big ‘tada!’ moment?

Being a Muslim, and a fairly educated individual who isn’t ignorant of spotting patterns, I wondered how long it would take before the terrorist theory would materialize.  I won’t lie, when the news initially broke, I was equally guilty of wondering whether it was my Muslim brethren (and believe me, I use that terminology super loosely in this instance).  But as the facts emerged I breathed a sigh of relief.  You’re probably sitting there slightly outraged at me.  How can I be ‘relieved’ to learn that it wasn’t a terrorist act since the fact still remains that those 300+ folks are still missing?

The tragedy to me is only too heart wrenching.  I’m not dismissing that, not by a long shot.  You’ll be interested in knowing that the reason I’m writing this blog at all is simply because over my cup of coffee this morning, as I was reading Yahoo news, I saw a picture of the mother of a passenger broken down sobbing hysterically during a news conference.  The article said she was crying out that she just wanted her son back before they removed her from the room (and before the police could get her).  My heart twisted into a knot.  I cannot even come close to understanding the anguish these folks are feeling.  Haunting the airport every day, looking for answers to questions that had been asked one too many times, wiping away tears of complete and utter helplessness.  The mother who waits for her child, the spouse who sits with baited breath for their loved one, a child waiting for his/her parent to come home to scoop them up and hold them tight and the friend who prays for the reappearance of a beloved buddy…who can ever understand what must be running through their head unless you’ve been in their shoes? 

But by now, you who have been reading my posts long enough know also that my empathy runs deep.  Yes, I’ve sat and wondered whether they replay memories in an endless cycle, whether every little piece of news becomes a reemergence of hope, whether they actually pray that terrorists had hijacked the plane because in some twisted way those folks would still be alive, may be not in the best of conditions but alive nonetheless.  So no, my relief wasn’t in that sense, I wasn’t thinking ‘better dead than alive and captured by terrorists’.  I could never be so cruel or selfish.

I was relieved because I’m tired of my religion getting a bad rep.  I’m sick of the disgusted looks of my fellow citizens when they look at me or my brown ilk.  When will it stop?  Some of you are saying to yourself ‘when they stop’.  You’re right.  I will not disagree.  When they stop is correct.  But when will they stop?  I don’t know.  Heck, will this question ever be answered?  As long as there are humans, there will be psychos.  There’s your answer.  Never.

But I ask you, when will we (Muslims) stop being accused of every tragedy that happens around the planet that isn’t associated with a natural ecological occurrence?  It’s as if things die down for a bit and whammo, something happens and Islam is back under the spot light, whether it’s warranted or not.  The first though is immediately ‘the Muslims strike again’. 

Again, I’m assuming you may be sitting there thinking to yourselves, ‘yes but you asked for it, look at what’s happened in the past.’  And yet again I would respond with 1.6 billion Muslims around the globe are not terrorists, only a few nutcase fanatics are and they do not represent the rest of us who are just trying to live, much like you non-Muslims. 

Even if in a few days/hours/minutes/seconds we discover that it was in fact terrorists who were able to not only hijack a big ass plane like that and steer it off course while in the meantime disabling all means of communication and radar tracking and then landing that (lemme repeat, big ass plane) somewhere which has a big enough strip of land…then wow.  I mean just wow, they are friggin’ geniuses.  And to top it off, no puffed up egotistical ‘we are the shiznit’ terrorist group has popped up anywhere to say ‘yeah, this was so us, booya biatches’.  Right, this is likely.

Seriously though, for a minute, unless it’s been proven so, can we just lay off the Muslims?  I’m one of them; you’ve gotten to know me long enough.  Do I seem like a terrorist to you?  The most I could do is terrorize you with my bad grammar and equally horrendous vocabulary as well as the occasional 2-year- old like sketches I insist upon posting.  You’re staring at the words of an everyday Muslim, in case you didn’t realize this already.  I am the same person you walk by on the street, who sits at the table next to you when you’re eating, who goes to the grocery store and is outraged over the price of onions or tomatoes, who gets excited about the next release of Star Wars (oh yes, and I am geeked) and who cries over stupid sappy movies.  I fall in love, in anger, in sadness, in frustration, I look to become solvent, I spend too much money on stuff I do not need, I fight with my family and I love my parents.  We say prayers for those suffering, give generously of our money and time to help in any which way possible and yes, we supplicate to Allah to ask for forgiveness and hope that we get into heaven.  You’re eyes focused on the word “Allah” didn’t it?  Well okay fine, replace it with any other word and we’re still yet the same person, aren’t we?

 I say a prayer every day for the passengers.  I can’t imagine the terror they lived through, or may be possibly living through.  I hope whatever has happened to them, there is some sort of closure for those hundreds of loved ones around the world awaiting some news, any news.  And yes, I’m also praying that it wasn’t a terrorist act and if it was, then let it be proven without a shadow of a doubt, not just blown out of proportion as news fodder and just another conspiracy theory. 

Give me a damn break.

Have a good day folks.