Nothing & Everything

I sat down at the table and started to eat. I remembered thinking to myself that the curry was missing something. As I ate, I started to regret buying the food at that particular stall. Then, something hit me...

Actually, it was the TV. I saw images that disturbed me. I saw death - a lot of it. It was the news and it was showing the footage of the latest casualties of an air strike by Israeli forces onto Lebanon. The curry went totally bland and it did not even matter then.

Silenced and ashamed, my eyes were glued to the TV screen. Wailing mothers grieving for their lost, maybe dead, children, forlorn-looking children not more than 5 years old squatting by the debris over a charred body, locals just standing around observing the carnage of what was once their homes. It was familiar. I was sure I had seen all of that before. And right I was.

Its the same scene over and over again. Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya...the list goes on. Why is this happening? What are we doing to stop this? Who is to blame? Chechnya alone have thousands and thousands of their people killed or abducted by Russian troops and this includes children and women. The media calls the Chechen army "rebels" when all they are doing is their duty which is to protect their countrymen on their own sovereign land.

Its a new war and this war is better known as the media. Anyone who has control and the means are able to take advantage of this thing called media. A camera is all you need to push your propaganda down other people's throats. Even if your propaganda is filled with lies and deceit and half truths, people tend to believe it because hey its CNN. The ones who manage to get the bigger slice of the media pie will be the ones who will be believed, drowning out the other side of the story no matter how untrue the content. The US certainly knows how to play this media game. They use it blatantly in their political pursuits. The media is at the mercy of its users, to be perverted, to be manipulated, even modified to suit one's gain. The media, proven to be a strong medium, is ironically unable to defend itself.

It has extended itself being an accomplice on many occassions. The media has aided many a crime, including making invading a sovereign nation particularly to serve one's own greedy political interest, a heroic act. It has been a silent witness to the greatest and most heinous conspiracy known in recorded history. It has helped to lie, cheat, steal, degrade, marginalize, manipulate....ingredients in a perverted recipe that we, the people, love to concoct and enjoy it ourselves. We find a hidden and subconscious desire and satisfaction in learning of another's downfall. We possess a selfish relief in consoling ourselves that " hey, I'm like so glad that it ain't us out there."

Somebody out there reading must be saying, or at least have this cross his/her mind :

"But the media has done a lot of good too!"

Well that is true, so true. But its just the way it is. Nobody cares. Just like how the media makes a big story out of the Moscow Theatre siege by Chechen "rebels". What the people see is how Muslim "terrorists" in masks take hostage of more than 800 people and how the Russian army "heroes" stormed the theatre killing all the bad-guys and saving the hostages. What we fail to remember and register in our minds is that the Russians had gassed the theatre beforehand resulting in deaths of a lot of hostages. So when gas-mask-wearing heroes save the day, we should ask ourselves who was the one doing all the killing that day? But who cares?

When the dictatorship-led Iraq was attacked and deemed to have weapons of mass destruction, the heroes of that day were the Americans. Most of us stood with them when they invaded Iraq in their pre-emptive bid to rid world of evil and I dare say some of us cheered when that statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down. And how do we know this? Oh, the media of course! Our eyes glued to the TV screen in silent admiration of the Oakley-sunglasses-clad soldiers. Some of us sympathised with them when they honored their dead who fell on the battle-field. On the other hand, do we care that after all that shelling and destruction added a few years on, we still have not seen concrete visual evidence of WMD in Iraq? Do we even pause to think before our meals and dwell on the fact that thousands of Iraqi children will only have breadcrumbs to eat that day?

And Palestine, oh Palestine! Where do I even begin? An evil injustice in that robbing someone of their own land is rightful. But do we care? Oh no! Because those guys who blow themselves up, they are the evil ones. At least, that is what the media helps us to think. I am not condoning suicide-bombing but I sure am not condoning masking the truth or twisting it or even making it up.

What about September 11th you ask? The media helps us to come to the conclusion that a group of Arab Muslim terrosists armed with box-cutters hijacked a few planes thus crashing two of them into the Twin Towers, the heat of the burning jet fuel melting the steel frames causing them to collapse. But who cares if the jet fuel's heat could never be enough to melt steel. Who cares if out of the nineteen hijackers, 5 to 7 of them have been discovered alive and well enough to interviewed. Who cares if WTC 7, a 47 storey building located near the Twin Towers which was not hit by any planes save for only a few fires, also collapsed and pulverised to dust later that fateful day. Who cares at all? Muslim terrorists did it, come what may that is the truth! Why?

Because the media said so...

Last month, we brought Al-Walad to Sentosa Island. He was very excited and we enjoyed ourselves a lot. It was his first time there and for some of us, the first time there after a long time.

My mom went together with us and so did my two sisters. My eldest sister brought along her family too which included her twin son and daughter. So, armed with my trusted Sony Ericsson w810i camera phone, I managed to piece together a little video of our outing. Please click on the link below and I hope you enjoy it...

muhammad@sentosa

There are also some photos that I took during the Sentosa trip which have just been uploaded to my photo album.

I have neglected this blog for quite a bit. I only wished I was not so busy. A lot of things happened during the past month. Israel air strikes on the Hezbollah in Lebanon prompting the latter to declare an open war. Another tsunami hit the Javanese coast costing close to 400 lives.

And here we are, busy with our mundane lives. Engrossed in our daily greed to be number one. We are so buried in our own personal desires that we forget to think about others. We forget how to act in times of emergency. Take for an example the incident reported in the papers about some ambulance crew trying to transport a collapsed patient down the elevator of a shopping center. They had to endure other shoppers who are determined to squeeze into the elevators and alight at their desired floors. What if the patient had died? What if the few seconds he/she needed to be saved are wasted by another shopper wanting to get to the Levi's Store on the 3rd floor? What if it was us, ourselves, on that stretcher?

Well, just as long as it ain't me...or is it?