Ramadan 5: Seeking Forgiveness

a note this morning, turned into an essay for us all.

It’s potentially the last day of my second Ramadan, and I am drinking hot water because I don’t have access to clean cold water where I live, and I forgot to boil water last night to have some to be ready for this morning, and yet… even then, the harshest reality of my life, is that my lack of clean drinking water, and the fact I’m living in the era of open genocide… are irredeemably interconnected, is not lost on me.

I live in what used to be considered the most formidable country in the world. A place that was known for being a first world nation, a place where others looked to come and find a “good, robust, life” for themselves and their families.

But the truth is, not only were we never really that at all, we were the exact opposite. We were the perpetuators of systemic world violence, and all at the cost of lives not only over seas all over the world, but also here at home in that same country who not only enables, but perpetuates destruction in its own borders as well.

My country has never really cared, about life… let alone liberty or the persist of happiness. It’s a deadman’s fallacy to even assume they believe that for the elite, let alone the peoples of the world. For the elite are no more happy than the rest of us, they are no more fulfilled. They are simply better liars to themselves and others about it.

While the rest of us, bear the moral, and ethical impact of the systems that cause us to be complicit in genocide, war, and ecocide, we too also bear the weight of a nation that would seek to hyperfund these things over our own peoples drinking water.

No more is it commercials telling us “a dollar a day can give drinking water to a family in X”, because for so many of us, it is a problem here, at home, not merely an issue isolated to some small village in a corner of the world we will never see with our own flesh and blood.

I open up my feed, or read books and essays that show in horrific technicolor, the reality of where my tax money goes, the blood, the bodies, the rubble, the bones, while boiling water in Chicago, and I cannot but see the direct connection between the two.

It is a harsh reality to live in, to see the world for what it is, and to know that humans as a whole are not horrible, but that the humans who are prone to evil, are so prone to it, that they would tear us all apart, and destroy the very gifts God has given us, to make money.

That’s it.

Money.

A completely arbitrary concept.

A thing created by man.

A thing that has made everything worse.

One more 0 on a screen of 1s and 0s, where the cost is the value of innumerable souls.

I have no access to clean drinking water in my tap, and Palestine, Sudan, the DRC, Cuba, Yemen, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Syria, South Africa, Taiwan, Venezuela, and countless other places all over the world, have felt the iron hammer of death.

Yet some person, somewhere, has made money off of both.

Ya Allah… may you forgive me for the ills I have done, the harm I have caused, the way in which my soul has been tied to the camel of destruction in this life without my consent. May you seek to give me and all of us your mercy. Ya Allah, may you wrought your mercy with equal weight as you sow your Justice. May those who have been harmed by the ills of this life, know true Justice in death. May they see the tyrants, the oppressors, the money fashioners of war, be given their due punishment. Ya Allah, may the martyrs of this world, those who died before they could even know words, and those who were killed by the human search for greed, find solace, eternal peace, and a comfort unknowable in life, may they be in your living and eternal embrace, and may we get the chance to beg not only your forgiveness but theirs. Ya Allah, may we know the fine edge of your mercy, and may we see the sharp line of Justice.

Ameen.