How much courage is needed to be cowards?
If we were to map out the terrain of conscience in this country, it has never looked so rugged and vacant. Never before has the landscape of scruples looked so desolate, its image blurred by membranes of doubts and fears heaving upon the lenses. Everything is torn between appearances and disappearances, victims and killers, and facts and fabrications. Never before has the crisis of conscience been so acute. We aren't worried because something is unfair or morally wrong. We're worried because we don't know if we should be worried at all.
Thus the biggest worry eating away this nation is worrying about worrying. If an octogenarian journalist has landed in jail, hand-on-heart not many of us know what to think of it. If a young woman was found dead, her body battered by the bestial wrath of her killers, we aren't sure if we will ever know what happened. When a university professor, two LGBT activists and a Hindu tailor are hacked to death, our minds swing like a pendulum between our gut feelings and the official versions of who killed them and why they must have been killed.
This nation is now stupefied with horror. We're afraid of what we see but don't have the courage to see what we're afraid of. We don't always know what's right and what's wrong. But the mind is akin to someone lying in bed, changing his position. It wants to toss and turn before it goes to sleep. If charity begins at home, clarity begins in mind. The mind needs its choice to enjoy that freedom.
Conscience is a lot like a skating rink, a given floor space where minds travel with roller skates. People like to engage in idle talks. They like to have discourses on relevant topics. They love to speculate, insinuate, calculate and dominate. This is how they're supposed to train their minds like flexing produces muscle gain.
How does a nation live when its people don't have the flexibility to flex their minds? These people must be able to see, think and speak, some more carefully and profoundly than others. Some of them can be uncannily accurate, some of them outrageously wrong, yet all of them must be able to express their minds without having to look over their shoulders.
Right now this nation is jittery and jumbled. Everyone walks a tightrope, and nobody knows what can get them in trouble. This country is a supermarket of cruelty, where hired hands and lunatics are free to pick their choices arrayed on the shelves of depravity.
So the hunters are now as varied as the hunted. We have religious zealots roaming our streets, striking at anyone who draws their wrath. If these people are working like religious police, the police are religiously working to root out the rest. Dissenting minds and outspoken voices are endangered species, rest of us being cowered into growing silence.
Thus our shrinking minds are shrinking our conscience. We are constrained like tenants shifting from a big house to a small apartment, forced to decide which items of value to carry with us under the space constraint. Does it matter to be honest? Does one need to tell the truth? Is it essential to help our neighbours? Is it wrong to compromise for money and success? Which is more important between conviction and convenience?
Perhaps, the oldest trade in the world was born in the twilight zone between compulsion and convenience, between lust and lure, between guilt and gumption. In this instance, the body is the victim that may or may not torment the soul, depending on what's more important to an individual. The soul is the victim in a crisis of conscience. It may or may not torment the body for the very same reason.
What's happening in this country is comparable to the function of an hourglass, the sand passing from the upper to the lower bulb. People are incessantly passing from soul to body, spiritual pursuit and satisfaction depleted for physical safety and comfort. It has always been a struggle to keep the body and soul together. Only this time the body is getting all the attention, while the soul is being ignored.
Call it anything, this nation is undergoing a transformation. Rulers rule, killers kill, victims die, and the rest of us watch. We're heavy in the body but hollow in the soul. Our homes, streets and neighbourhoods are crammed with silhouettes anxious about being anxious. And in that anxiety, those silhouettes are hiding from each other.
Every country has its share of courageous people. Every country has its share of cowards. Funnily, in this country a quiet migration is taking place from one side to another. A growing number of us are getting convinced that it takes a lot of courage to be cowards.
The writer is editor of the weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star. Email: [email protected].
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