Yesterday was quite a normal day, nothing unusual about it but then the dreaded clock struck 7 and the news about a Dacoit, a Snatcher and a Low Life Thug being shot to death in Benazir park started airing on various news channels. This was not an attention worthy piece of information since as a nation we are now accustomed to hearing gun shots, seeing blood and dead bodies and living our lives constantly under the threat and fear of being bombed or shot at any point of time during broad day light or when the skies turn dark.
But yesterday, the skies did not turn dark, they turned red. Red because of the blood of the youth that was shot in cold blood at point blank range by a few uniformed, courageous protectors of the citizens of Karachi. The video of this entire incident is a chilling reminder that we, as a nation, are on the brink of a huge Mental Collapse. We proved that we all are angry and we want to take our anger out on something or someone by burning some people alive in Karachi, our state of mind reared its ugly head again when the two brothers from Sialkot were lynched to death by an angry mob, and we proved that we are not fit to be called humans when we shot dead a pregnant woman, killing her and her unborn baby, along with 4 other innocent people in Kharotabad. Every day we hear stories about a how a man gruesomely killed his father, mother and the rest of the family or how a man slayed his wife and children for reasons known or unknown.
I am not going to dwell into the argument of this incident being a breach of the law because we all know that it truly was a slap across the face of the law. But I would like to take a look at it from a humane point of view. Shooting someone that is pleading for his life at point blank range while looking directly into his begging eyes takes a lot of heart, or no heart or feelings, as a matter of fact. I am pondering over the state of the mind of the ranger’s officials that shot him and then left him there to die a miserable and painful death. I cannot get over the fact that even if the guy was a criminal, a snatcher or a no good excuse for a human being than too shooting him like that must have required a lot of anger inside those rangers’ officials to urge them to commit such a dreadful atrocity against humanity.
Violence and anger are two elements that are increasingly being witnessed on a more regular basis in our society. On the roads, while forming queues, at home, in the workplace and amongst friends, we all seem to solve all our problems though verbal and physical assaults. It’s like we are walking backwards on the path towards ethics and ethical maturity. I don’t know when it all went wrong but sadly it has gone horribly wrong and we have no one else to blame for it but ourselves. We chose the wrong people as our religious leaders, as our political leaders and as our saviors, and when they turned out to be the ultimate bad guys we started to get mad and angry at our own dumbness. But since we were intelligent enough to blame others for our mistakes we started to take our anger out on people who had nothing to do with the misfortune that had befallen us and this practice has now taken a toll on the entire nation.
