I’m here to describe the elephant, or the world, from my perspective in Lahore, Pakistan. I hope this helps you where you are.
The first thing that strikes me about the world is how toxic it has become. I can’t breathe. From November to February, the blue sky is hidden behind a low gray ceiling. This is not from the clouds, but from the smoke. It’s strange to be on a plane these last few months and find yourself seconds after takeoff into a blinding light, only to see a blanket of gray instead of a city below. The cooler months were a month of playing outdoor sports, running around with my cousins, and shielding my eyes from the sun with my hand blade. Now, in these months, the earth receives too little heat to push the smoke up into the sky, so it settles out all over the river plains and is blocked from moving north by the mass of the Himalayas. , is suffocating us.
My children are not allowed to play outdoor sports during these months. Inside, I sleep to the hum of the air purifier, a sound I could never have imagined until recently. When we played in the winter as children, we quenched our thirst by moving the shaft of a hand pump at our grandparents’ house. My children don’t go out to play now. All hand pumps are dry. We have depleted our aquifers. Mechanical excavations are needed to extract water from hundreds of meters below, but even that water is contaminated. Our world has become toxic. The fireflies are gone, the kids are coughing like smokers, and the water is full of heavy metals. The economic miracle we were promised has arrived, but it is a miracle of devastation.
Another thing that strikes me about the world is that it’s becoming crueler. Perhaps people have always been massacred, just as the people of Gaza are being massacred. My children watch on their devices as children in Gaza talk about their dead parents, siblings, teachers, and neighbors. My kids come home from school and ask, “What are you doing? “What can we do? What can we do?” They post flags and images of solidarity on social media. They share songs and stories. They wave and get excited when they spot rickshaws and food stalls with messages of support for the Palestinian people. My daughter is fasting this month, and we discuss the contrast between a person’s voluntary daily exposure to hunger and the experience of starvation. We raise funds for refugee relief, reconstructive surgery and family departure costs.
Perhaps people have always been slaughtered this way. But have they always been slaughtered for such hypocrisy? People protesting for peace, equality, and human rights are being vilified so much, losing their jobs, losing their chance at citizenship, by such powerful actors in such powerful countries, so many assertive countries. Have you ever been threatened with suspension from university? For exactly these values? I might not have been alive when British colonial officers ordered the shooting of peaceful protesters in Amritsar, or when American police officers attacked peaceful protesters in Selma. unknown. But the hypocrisy and silence of those in power regarding the massacre in Gaza feels new to me. It feels fresh to the children as well. I see them rejecting the world’s moral trajectory. I see them rejecting certain soft drinks or even hamburgers because they are tainted by association.
When you perceive an elephant, you perceive poison and cruelty. I too feel love, kindness, and beauty, but they appear like flowers through gaps in concrete. I derive joy and sustenance from flowers. But then you wonder why the World Government led us down the path of laying so much concrete.
World government is often thought of as fantasy, dystopia, or utopia, depending on how it is imagined and who sees it, regardless of whether we are in the future. But the truth is that it belongs to the recent past. Because we had the first world government of its kind, and that world government was the United States. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of Kabul, America took an unprecedented role in governing the world. It was unprecedented, but it also came to an end. As that role ends, because too many Americans don’t want America to play that role, and too many non-Americans don’t want America to play that role, The world that was made possible will also end.
In the midst of the toxicity and brutality, I feel a growing sense of longing for the end to come quickly, for there to soon be far less concrete, more space, more cracks. Perhaps the lone hope is that flowers might emerge from at least some of these cracks. We don’t know if the flowers will reach us or not. Worse could happen. But my sense is that here in Lahore and all over the world that I see in my travels, a huge number of people are imagining and feeling that it’s time to try something different.
