Stones and Dogs

Today I am feeling so miserable.

Today is Saturday and I am off today. I am home and have nothing to do. So I am reduced to sleeping, and watching TV between numerous bouts of sleep. Whenever I turn the TV on and listen to the regurgitated news, and see talking-heads drone on and on about the presidential "election", a hoax in fact, and the "deal" that preceded it, and the quick-fix ordinance that gave a blanket protection to the corrupts and the criminals who have blood on their hands and lucre in their off shore bank accounts, I feel like a person who is forced to helplessly watch his house burning from behind the bars.

I can't do anything about it so I end up feeling miserable. I try to calm myself by telling my blood not to boil over because I am afraid of getting an ulcer or something worse - a brain hemorrhage, may be.

But it does not help.

A question constantly hovers over my already high-strung nerves. That question always starts with a 'why' or 'where'.

Why did we want or need a country of our own, in the first place, if we could not figure out how to run it, without running it into ground? Why did we lose a value system - a sense of right and wrong? Why is it only the 'expedient' rather than right, we want to do, paying no mind to the fact whether it has any good in it for our masses or for our country? Why do we have no morality left?

So many whys. More than one person's mind can handle without going to what American call the luny bin, and Pakistanis call the mental hospital.

Don't they - these power-hungry power-grabbing classes - see rampant misery, poverty, cruelty, and oppression of the masses? How can they? They are the ones who have made this mess.

Security personnel is not secure! Military Jawans and officers, in hundreds, are kidnapped in broad day light, and slaughtered without impunity. Military schools are being abandoned and their students moved. Society over all has been ripped apart into polarized, contentious factions of all hues and stripes. Hundreds of innocent people have been abducted by 'security forces and intelligence agencies' and are traceless. The masses are dieing with hunger, disappointment, and hopelessness? They are illiterate and sick and have no hope of getting any education or cure.

A few who are still clinging to the values and principles are laughed at and made fun of. They are considered stupid and ridiculed for not cashing in their virtue, honesty and integrity for a few days' of power-sharing. Pakistan has become a country where, in Saadi's and Faiz's lamenting word, the stones are tied up and the dogs are free to loiter, bark, and bite.

Is there any light visible at the end of this dark, long tunnel?

Where is the power of the virtuous? Why the miserable classes don't unite against their oppressors? Why don't they rise up - all at once - and throw out and destroy the system of oppression and those who support it? Why are they taking so long to understand that their emancipation lies in their own unity and recognizing the faces of their oppressors and getting rid of them?

Is there any remedy left short of being drastic?

If the miserable, appressed masses of Pakistan decide to stand up en mass and destroy, once and for all, the oppressive system and not be content with changing faces of oppressors, they won't be miserable any longer.

And I am sure I won't feel miserable either, on my day off.