Seeing

Not one of my best pieces but I though I might as post it. It was a short piece I wrote in the beginning of the year regarding my personal experience with the Syria Revolution.

Staring at my blank screen wondering what I’m going to spew out onto the empty document before me, I open my web browser and log onto to the ever famous Facebook, a place where teenagers spend countless hours stalking each other. However as I continue to scroll down my newsfeed, I’m not passing pictures of that one girl I used to talk to in kindergarten or a status update from the guy who sits behind me in math about what kind of sandwich he’s eating. As I scroll down, I see multiple news report on the Free Syria Army, gruesome pictures of martyrs, and statuses announcing the death of yet another family friend. This is my daily update and one of my only connections to my home, Syria.

My parents emigrated from Syria to the states in 1991, leaving their family and friends behind in hopes to better their medical careers. Although meeting and marrying here, both are a hundred percent, full breed Syrian citizens and have made it a priority to ensure that their children never forget that. Whether it was from the Syrian food that was dished out on our dinner table to the countless sweltering summers I spent there with my family, I have a great love for my country and my culture. So you can only imagine the feelings that have been racing through my body for a year now regarding the Syrian revolution.

If you have flipped through the news channel in the last year, chances are you have heard of the Arab Spring and have seen the struggles of the Libyan and Egyptian people as they have fought for freedom. These revolutions, despite the countless Libyan and Egyptian friends, felt distant and intangible to my life.  However, I can still recall the end of the Libyan revolution because that day my good friend turned to me and said, “Syria is next”. Although scoffing at the remark and ignoring it as I continued with my life, soon enough my friend was proven true.

One day of March 2011, a group of teenage boys in the city of Daraa grafittied a wall with the saying “The people want to topple the regime”. These teens where then taken into custody and tortured senselessly as a result of the emergency laws of 1936, which states that the government has all rights to imprison and torture whoever they like with no need of a warrant, reason, or trial.  This act of cruelty against these young boys threw the country over edge and people began protesting. Although the government has ruthlessly tried to oppress its people by shooting at peaceful citizens, abducting those who are affiliated with the revolution, and closing off entire cities from the rest of the world, the revolution has continued on for close to fifteen months.

Throughout this revolution, my life has been hectic. Now not only must my family and I deal with normal issues such as school and work, we must come home to a new family member missing or a new news report on how many dead that day. We have to deal with countless causes of disappearances of friends and destruction of our home. I still find it hard to believe all that is going on around me. It’s hard to see all this going on around me while the world sits around and watches people dying by the minute in a country that is killing its own cold, starving civilians who are barely holding onto life as it is. As the world watches, families are being broken, lives are being cut short, heroes are being dragged through the streets, and nightmares turn into reality while reality turns into a nightmare. And it is even more devastating to know this isn't the first time that the world has turned its back to such an atrocity. The world can take example in Darfur, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. Yet the world is still silent. With its mouth zipped shut and its eyes blindfolded tight, the world turns away when humanity needs it the most. As people are screaming at the top of their lungs for freedom, justice, and equality, the world plugs into its headphones of ignorance and turns it up at full volume. While history plays over and over the people continue to focus on petty things while their greed and selfishness consume them. When will then world see that Syria is calling, and they need to answer.

So as I scroll through Facebook I wish I could be seeing pictures of that one girl I used to talk to in kindergarten or a status update from the guy who sits behind me in math about what kind of sandwich he’s eating. Because with those I may ignore, I may be ignorant, and I may be blind. But scrolling through my Facebook now, I can see despair, tragedy, pain, and sorrow. And the most tragic detail is, I am one of the only ones seeing it. 

Reviews

[Annie]

Wow... how poignant. I love the description, but I'm sorry for your losses. Don't worry, I see.