An excuse for a very long absence...

Wow, it's 2006 already!

It's been slightly over a year since my last entry. In my defense, I do have at least three entries waiting in the drafts room awaiting a conclusion. Things got so hectic last year that by the time I would return to complete my thoughts, I felt they weren't relavent any more. By summer I was busy becoming a Mommy to a wonderful baby boy and lately I'm running around trying to keep him from putting those beads that fall off of my head into his mouth! That's quite a task considering that thoughts of him consume most of my time.

I have been trying very hard not to become one of those ladies that just go on and on and on about their kids oblivious to anything else in the world. But I think I still come off giving the impression that I really have nothing else but baby to talk about, which is not true but I just don't have the time to write about much else. The few drool covered beads I'm able to salvage from the mouth of my little one go towards a quarterly newsletter that I put together for the Spouses Association for my husband's company. It's one of the few things that keeps me believing that having a child hasn't turned me into a dumb mommy whose vocabulary and thoughts have been reduced to baby babble.

One of my new year's resolution is to return to the blogging world and contribute further to the ocean of opinions already floating around on the web. It may mean nothing to anyone else. This was after all just meant to be a venting vualve for me to keep my mind jogging and my opinions flowing. My thoughts may not make a difference to anyone else, but to put them out there will enable me to disect, challenge, grow and strengthen my own values and beliefs... beliefs that I will pass on to my son. That's a good enough reason for me to come back.

The joys of expecting... and the shame!

There is no joy greater than that of knowing that a miracle is taking place ever so quietly within your body, that all the sciences and all the myths and all of God's forces are working together to create a life inside. It is the most amazing thing, when you are lucky enough to have such a facility, to watch that life grow week after week, from nothing to something that looks like a mini-dinasaur the whole 10mm long and then on to something more human, with tiny arms, legs and a belly, a fluttering heartbeat showing on the sonogram, moving about within it's little cavity, still so small and months away from being in our arms.

Aside from the sonograms, there is little evidence on the outside that I am carrying a miracle inside me, but I keep looking at our miracle's pictures from the sonogram, and I can feel its heart beat, I can imagine it moving about. I want to sing to it, talk to it. Occasionally, though, I want to share my joy with others. I want to show them how our baby's growing. I want to tell them... this week our baby will learn to use it's hands, or it will actually move away if I shine a flashlight at my tummy because it's eyes will become more sensitive to light.But I can't. This is one of the happiest times of my life and I can't share it with anyone and I don't understand why.

I'm sure there are people reading this, particularly those from our culture or religion, who are blushing and perhaps thinking this information is a tad inappropriate, if not outright shameful. But that logic eludes me. In the Muslim world, you begin learning early on in school that we must have children. Once you get married, you have everyone asking you when and if a little one is on the way. It gets worse later on... "you've been married how long... and no kids? have you checked with the doctor?" I have even had people ask me "Are you doing it right or often enough?" It can be relatives, friends, acquaintances or complete utter strangers. It's as if everyone has the right to discuss and pry in public (possibly in a mixed gender gathering) what is essentially a very private part of your life and your marriage. But no one sees any shame there. I am expected to share the private details of my personal life of how long we've been "trying" (Gosh, I wish people would know how embaressing that is) what the doctors have said, but once I'm expecting and our miracle is on the way, suddenly we're all modest and pure. What's shameful about a baby that is on it's way? If anything is shameful, it's the "trying" part! But no one feels any shame discussing that openly.

A friend of mine made a scrapbook of her daughter's 1st year in this world. As I was flipping through the first couple of empty pages, she told me she had meant to put up some songram pictures there, but then she felt embaressed. I wondered, how embaressed are people when they ask her if she and her hubby are trying for another? And how embaressed is she when she answers that question? This is just one of a long list of hypocrasies we live with in our religious culture. A woman is to feel shame for carrying a baby for 9 months. She is to make every attempt to hide the swelling of her belly. Why? I've noticed that people from our culture tend to be more discrete now when asking me how I'm progressing, whispering vague statements like," So is everything okay?" (accompanied by uncomfortable laugh), compared to earlier when people would just ask me and hubby upfront,"So, are you guys trying for a baby? Enough fun already!"

Next time someone sheepishly asks me how everything is going along, I'm going to pat my tummy and say, "Baby's doing well, Alhamdulillah. Wanna see a picture?"

A special gift...

It lay sparkling on her cheek, still, and yet so fluid. It wasn't like the other beads that so often rolled off her head, hard with thought and conviction. It was different, seemingly weaker and more powerful all at the same time, filled with emotion that, were it to spill, would flood the entire universe. All this weakness, all this power lay in the tiny sparkling transparent pearl drop resting on her cheek, exposed and vulnerable, clear enough for anyone to see through it... while it's small size hid the true intensity imprisoned within it.

She decided to let it roll down the side of her face and she spread open her palm to capture it's fall, at the end of which her transparent gleaming bead would disappear and a moist glitter on her palm would be all that remained of it, all those emotions dissolving into oblivion. That's what usually happened with these beads anyway, and so she expected nothing different. She closed her eyes and felt it roll down to the edge of her face and as it fell she slowly opened her eyes to follow it's flight, and for a moment, it seemed that there were two such pearls falling into her palm at the same time.....

Then something strange happened that had never happened before... instead of vanishing the pearl seemed to get brighter, it even seemed to grow! A ray of moonlight lit up her gem and in excitement, as well as for some fear, she looked up.... and there he was... the answer to the riddle... his moist eyes staring back at hers as he covered her palm with his. He had finally given her what she had sought for a long time.... he had given her one of his own moist pearls. He had decided to share his own, and now they both shared a single glowing pearl, laying softly between their palms.

The moonlight began a quiet dance with the water lilies, and the pond shimmered to add it's own music. The breeze joined in with a hum, and the leaves twirled and pranced. It woke up the wind chime who giggled a gleeful tinkle when it realized what was going on. Felicity had found the treasure she was searching for. She had found her happiness.

He moved a strand of hair from her face and out fell some of the brightest clearest beads that had ever fallen from her head. Somehow the best came only when he was around, or at least when the thought of him was around. He caught some in his hand while some sprinkled on the ground around their feet.

"Please keep them as my gift to you," she whispered, lost in the euphoria of the moment, forgetting all that had happened before.

No sooner had the words left her mouth that he turned and ran away, the glistening beads dropping through his fingers as he let them go, a few getting crushed under his feet as he rushed off to his hiding place. The trees tried to stop him, the moonlight chased after him and the breeze called out to him, but he out-ran them all. Her gaze followed his trail until it could keep up no more, and he disappeared into the darkness.

She stared into the empty space where she last saw him. Somehow everyone seemed to like her beads except him, even though she saved the best ones for him. Perhaps that was what had kept her from sharing her gems with anyone initially. She looked down at the gleaming beads that lay around her feet and she decided to crush a few herself. It amazed her how her beads could ordinarily survive flying into branches and falling on rocks but around him they became so fragile. She felt another moist bead on her cheek and she let it fall to the ground and vanish. This time it didn't even leave any glitter.

Her sight fell on her open palm, where her glowing pearl... their glowing pearl... lay still. She folded her fingers in to encase it, undecided if she was happy or sad. Perhaps it was enough for him to have given her what he had, she supposed. It was more than what she had ever expected of him. Maybe, in time he would grow to value her gifts to him. It was a dream, surely, but... she thought, as she peaked at the glowing gem through her fingers... if this could happen, couldn't anything?

She closed her eyes and let out a sigh, content that at least now she had a part of him with her. A dandelion flew by and kissed her forehead before floating off again. The moonlight embraced her, while the breeze began to hum a tune to lull her to sleep. Felicity hadn't found what she had been searching for, but for now what lay in her palm was enough to leave a smile on her lips.

Blaming Bush....

When America goes to the polls next week, the single most important issue that could determine who becomes president will very likely be Iraq. Some voters may think about taxes, some about medicare and healthcare reform and the import of prescription drugs from Canada . Some may think about stem-cell research and abortion rights, other's about border control and immigration issues and most may think about jobs and the economy; but, rest-assured, everyone will be thinking about Iraq.­

It's a close race between Bush and Kerry, and with only a week to go before election day, there is news that tons... not a ton, but tons... of explosives have mysteriously gone missing in Iraq. It's bad enough that they can't find the WMD's. The mess in Iraq is no secret. Even Bush supporters know how bad it is. A couple of months ago, Bill Clinton was on the Late Show with David Letterman promoting his book. Letterman told Clinton that he asked his (Letterman's) dad who he was going to vote for and why. His dad replied that the Republicans kept sending him letters and calling him to solicit donations for the campaign, and he sent them the money so they would stop bothering him. So that tells me who you're voting for, Letterman said to his dad, but that doesn't tell me why, to which his father said that he didn't think it was a good idea to change leadership when you're in the middle of a mess like Iraq.

But if Americans vote against Bush come November 3rd, it should only be to avoid the impression of acquiescence to Bush's policies and his approach. If they disagree with the principles behind his policies, they have more to worry about than who becomes president. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" makes it seem that Bush had a personal advantage in going after Saddam and protecting the Saudis, specifically the Bin Laden Family, who supposedly share common business/financial interests with the Bush family. But most of "Fahrenheit" is propaganda against Bush and offers little in the way of an intellectual and critical analysis of Bush government policies and actions. Most Kerry supporters may be under the impression that Kerry would not have gone to war in Iraq, but the truth is America would have gone to Iraq regardless of who was President.

­Hindsight is always 20/20 and it's easy to say it would have been better to invest more troops in Afghanistan to find Osama than to get entangled in Iraq, but the question is: based on the intelligence available at the time, would a different president have decided against moving into Iraq?­­

The President of a democracy is subject to the will of the people. US troops invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and the Taliban regime was destabilized rather quickly. There was hardly any solid infrastructure to target in a country already in ruins. Before the end of the year, the US had taken control away from the Taliban regime. But Osama was still missing and the task of finding him in the mountains in Northern Pakistan was going to be a slow process even if the US deployed more troops for the search. In the mean time, the American public would have grown weary of waiting for the culprits of 9/11 to be brought to justice. Eventually there would have been pressure on the President to offer more... more than just arrests of people supposedly linked to Al Qaeda, more than just over throwing the Taliban regime who supposedly offered sanctuary to Osama and Al Qaeda operatives. Even as a nation with the highest literacy rate in the world, the American public would have wanted to see more immediate results. The president, in the interest of remaining in office and maintaining the support of the public would have conceded to an effort that would have supposedly had a more "satisfying", more tangible impact. Fighting a war against an enemy with no physical geographic boundaries made it difficult to measure success. The US needed an Enemy behind a specific geographic boundary. Enter Saddam Hussein.­­

Saddam already enjoyed notoriety from the Gulf War in the early 1990's. An effort had been underway to depose Saddam since then, except no one had been willing to deal with the consequent post Saddam Iraq. The pretext of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait pertained to internal OPEC deliberations where Saddam felt that Kuwaiti and Saudi refusal to forgive Iraq it's war debt and lower oil production and raise gas prices was a deliberate attempt on their part to weaken the Iraqi people and hurt their economy and their pride. Initially the Bush Sr. regime failed to send any warnings to Saddam, which Saddam considered a green light to invade and was sincerely surprised by the bellicose reaction of the US. Official US policy was to take no side in any border conflict, although unofficially the US had taken sides and provided unofficial aid both in the Afghan and the Iran/Iraq war during the 1980's. But here US interests in Kuwait were directly at stake and that meant going to War. Iraq had since been restrained with sanctions and subject to UN weapons inspections. In 1998 President Clinton declared that the great danger confronting the US and its allies was the "threat Iraq poses now-a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers, or organized criminals who travel the world among us unnoticed."

Clinton furthered explained that:

Iraq "admitted, among other things, an offensive biological warfare capability, notably, 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs. And I might say UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq has actually greatly understated its production. . . .

"Over the past few months, as [the weapons inspectors] have come closer and closer to rooting out Iraq's remaining nuclear capacity, Saddam has undertaken yet another gambit to thwart their ambitions by imposing debilitating conditions on the inspectors and declaring key sites which have still not been inspected off limits . . . .

"It is obvious that there is an attempt here, based on the whole history of this operation since 1991, to protect whatever remains of his capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, the missiles to deliver them, and the feed stocks necessary to produce them. The UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons. . . ."

The Clinton administration had maintained a policy of sporadic air-strikes against Iraqi infrastructure, but kept short of risking a showdown. The Republicans had always viewed such use of military power as feckless and weak and during the run up to the 2000 elections, Bush and his posse had made clear that they would jettison this Clinton era approach. But once in office, George W. appeared to follow suit with Clinton's policy. The about-face on his campaign rhetoric could have been explained by the perspective gained by assuming the seat of president where one is held accountable for the consequence of one's actions as well as the limited appetite at the time of the American people for another large-scale Gulf war.

But the events of September 11, 2001 changed that. American hearts were bleeding for their dead. An opportunity reared it's head. There may not have been a direct connection between Iraq and the September 11 attacks, and there wasn't any way to prove a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but the case against Iraq had already been made... astonishingly, by a different president who wasn't even republican, long before September 11 ever happened. It wouldn't have been very hard for a charismatic president with a good speech writer to convince the world that in spite of UN weapons inspections, Iraq did pose a threat as a potential supplier of WMD's to Al Qaeda or other terrorist operations against the US, even if in truth it was no where close.

Bush's failure lies in that he is not a politician. He made his intention to enter Iraq with our without international support, with or without a UN mandate, too apparent. He didn't play the political game. That's the reason half of America wants a new president. It's also the same reason why the other half wants to keep him in office. They see him as a straight shooter, a man of ideals and conviction. They like that he was a C-grader and that he isn't an intellectual, that he thinks and acts the way they would. George W. thought that if the ideology of the war in Iraq appealed to him, it would appeal to the rest of the world. he believed in the principle so strongly that he figured there could be no way that anyone could not see that it was the right thing to do. Unfortunately, being a C-grader, he never realized that the rest of the world would see through American ideology for the self-serving policy it truly is, or that not all countries in the world, not even the NATO members shared a common ideology with the US. That is why political gaming is important. A different president would have played the political game. He would have still gone to war.... perhaps seeking US control over oil in Iraq, perhaps to protect the rich Saudi's who have Billions invested in the US and in other US interests around the world and ticking them off could hurt the US as a whole or maybe just the financial interests of particular shareholders and board-members who are also active members of the current US regime, perhaps.... I will not speculate on the basis of US foreign policy... but, a different president would have made a better case and done a better job of convincing his public and the rest of the world, or the parts of the world that count, that his actions were worth undertaking and deserved support.

An interesting thing to note is that the US has maintained a somewhat consistent foreign policy for decades and through various regimes and administrations, regardless of political slant, with only slight differences in implementation depending on the personal touch of the particular Chief Executive in office. I do not know what the principles underlying this foreign policy are, nor do I thoroughly know the policy unofficially maintained by the US. Officially, the US maintains a neutral stance on border conflicts. Officially, the US maintains that a country's internal political and civil conflicts are it's own to resolve. Officially, the US does everything in it's power to safeguard the rights of humanity. Unofficial US policy is, as we know now, very different. All the Bush regime has done is that it has brought the truth about US foreign policy out into the open. It has exposed it's self-serving nature. American never really did care for international opinion, it just did a better job of pretending it did. America has always carried out it's plans at will. When Clinton sent US planes to strike locations in Iraq when former president Bush was allegedly attacked on his visit to Kuwait, he didn't wait for international permission, nor did he seek international approval. The UN has always been powerless against the US, just as it is now. The US could go into Iraq to save people from a tyrant who was letting them live in meager conditions, but the US relies on the UN, the same UN it termed ineffective when it refused to give the green light for Iraq, to resolve the conflict in Darfur while it does nothing to save thousands from being massacred by a militia group possibly protected by the Sudanese government. It is no different than the US charging ahead to save innocent Kuwaiti's from a bloodless invasion by Iraq and standing by for the UN to save the Bosnians from the devastation and genocide at the hands of Milosevic's army.

Americans cannot blame Bush for the current US policy. If they disagree with the policy, they must delve deeper in their search for the premise. I do not know that premise. I suspect that it is to protect and/or further particular US interests/agendas, the nature and purpose of which I am not aware of, nor do I know or understand why so many different presidents would continue to stand by it... unless the assassination of JFK was a result of his dissent... but I am just speculating. My object is to make the public realize that a new president will not change the current policy. It will only serve to cover up what of that policy has been revealed. If Kerry wins, Bush will serve as a scapegoat and the political games of lying, bribing, threatening and convincing allies and non-allies of the virtues of American philosophy will recommence. If Americans can blame Bush for anything, it would be exposing the sinister truth about US policy.

Condolences and more...

The news came as a shock. Although I only knew one "petite" Badar who studied with his even more petite fiance (who later went on to become his wife), I refused to believe it was the same Badar. We had worked together on some group projects and presentations during the early BBA semesters. We remained acquaintances after that, occasionally exchanging a friendly greeting if we happened past each other on campus. Just a couple of years ago, my parents came to know that the wife from a young couple they had met in Calgary was actually his sister, and so now... he is not just an acqaintance and former classmate, but he is also the brother of a family friend. That makes the news of his violent murder harder to digest. It just can't be... (http://knicq.blogspot.com/2004/10/family-destroyed.html)

One can never come up with the right thing to say at moments like this. Beyond the torture Badar must himself have endured, I cannot stop thinking of the torture that his wife, his parents, his siblings are going through right now as they replay scenes of horror in their minds...

Death itself is hard enough to deal with. The senselessness of violence must make the pain unimaginable. Even if they can eventually come to terms with his death, they will never come to terms with the violence that he suffered. "Why?" will always haunt them. It will haunt us, and he wasn't even a part of our lives. I feel anger in my heart, and I can't imagine the wrath that must boil over from the hearts of his family. If we pray to god to give peace and strength to the families who lose their loved ones, then we must pray ten times as hard for Badar's family, for that peace and strength must be very elusive right now.

At times like these it is best to say little, and yet I cannot help myself. Perhaps it is my effort to make some sense of what has happened, or my attempt to prevent this from being just another tragedy. I hope we take away something more than just grief from this tragedy. I hope this does not end with just prayers, a funeral, and the apprehension and bringing to justice of his killer. I want more... we all should want more.

In the movie "Collateral", Tom Cruise's character kills a man who falls on the Taxi he has taken hostage to take him around town for his killing spree. The Taxi driver is obviously shaken, to which Cruise's character asks him if he knows of Rwandans, who kill thousands of people a day, burning entire villages alive. He asks him if that ever made him join Amnesty International or the Red Cross or any movement to protect human lives, and if it didn't why was he freaking out over a single guy's killing who he knew as much as he knew the next Rwandan.

Cruise's character in the film of course is a killer with a cool psychotic rationale. But his character makes a point worth pondering. We never really care about violent death until it hits too close to home, and even then, we may never really do much about it. So Ejaz has been apprehended and hopefully punished for the crime he has committed; is that really the end of the story? SHOULD that really be the end of the story?

We will say our prayers for the dead and the surviving, and then we will return to our lives as usual. Occasionally the thought of this crime will incite pangs of anger and pain and not much else. But there is SO MUCH ELSE to be done, so much else we need to do, and we just don't realize it.

We can write pages on killings in Rwanda, Darfur, Palestine and Kashmir - what could be done, what should be done - and yet we will leave from here with only two lines of prayers and feel we are no longer obliged. Do we really think this is it? Do we really think there will be no more Badar's and no more Ejaz's?

As a society, we are complacent, self-centered, and content with out blind apathy. We are quick to relieve ourselves of any responsibility of any such tragedies and crimes. "It's Society" we claim, yet who does society comprise of if not us? It's about time we did something to change the state of affairs. We are not victims... we are not helpless mind-numbed slaves of societal doctrine.... we are the creators of those doctrine, we decide which direction society takes, and if we have chosen to let society become it's own animal, then it is a choice we have made, not a decision imposed on us. Perhaps we have made this choice so we can turn away when bad things happen... blame someone else, something else... so we can point a finger and comfort ourselves with the thought that we were never a part of it. Yet we are. If we are a part of that same society, then we are a part of it, even if our part won't show for another few years.

Let's stop blaming the government and our law enforcement agencies, for once. Let's stop blaming the tobacco industry, the pharmaceuticals, the gun-makers and the hunters who use them. Let's stop blaming capitalism, fanaticism, fundamentalism, or any ism. Let's stop blaming television programs, video games, books and novels. Let's stop blaming the schooling system, or the underpaid and under-qualified teachers. Let's stop blaming bad parents and dysfunctional families...

Let me correct that... let's not blame these institutions and elements as if we are removed from them... let's not pretend we aren't a part of them.

Blame OUR mode of government, OUR enforcement of law (or lack thereof), OUR capitalist, fanatic, fundamentalist or other ideals, OUR over-indulgence in tobacco, medication and guns, OUR television programs, video games, books and novels that we print produce and make available that propagate and fantasize violence, OUR schooling systems, OUR under-qualification to teach our children, OUR bad parenting and the dysfunctional families WE create...

Truth is, as jarring as this experience may have been, we really don't know what else to do but move on with our lives. It's the way we have been trained to deal with pain and death. The only one's who have difficulty moving on are the persons directly affected by it, but even they will eventually move on, and years later there lives will be no different than ours, and this will just be a memory, albeit a very painful one... but still, just a memory. And there is nothing wrong with moving on with life. What is wrong is moving on as if nothing ever happened. We may have been about as directly involved and responsible for Badar's tragedy as for the ongoing tragedies in Darfur (not at all)... but that doesn't mean that we say our prayers and never think about it again. If there is anything we should feel guilty about after a death resulting from violence, it shouldn't be the continued calm in our own life, it shouldn't be the music we still enjoy in our cars, it shouldn't be the jokes and the laughter that are a part of our life or our character. If there is anything we should feel guilty about... it should be not resolving to ensure that neither we nor our children ever in any way become directly responsible for an act of violence. We must stop to consider if we might be contributing to a future act of violence by encouraging prejudices and intolerance in any form, be it for a person or an ideology. We must consider if we are raising ourselves and our children to consider alternative ways of dealing with attitudes, persons or events that may not be palatable for us so we may avoid resorting to violence, either in action or in words. We must pay more attention to the choices we make, more attention to the choices our children make.

I pray for Badar's soul, but more than that, I pray for his surviving family. Badar still has plenty to pray for him.... His family has one less person to pray for them. I pray that God may give them strength to endure and peace to resolve his death, and that He may strengthen their love that it may bind them together and comfort them. Badar will never come back, and the only solace for his family will be that we, society, take something from this grief... from their grief... and resolve to do our bit in preventing another act of senseless violence that could steal a son, a brother, a husband, a father and a friend all at once, just like that.