On Wednesday morning, like most mornings, I woke up and took my phone off of airplane mode. At this moment, on a good day, I get a message from a friend (read: my mum) and maybe a snapchat from someone I don't really talk to, but nevertheless enjoy watching the life of. This morning I woke up to a few messages about stressful money things, and a notification from the NY Times that there had been a terror attack in Istanbul. Usually if I see anything about the city, I have a quiet reminisce about a city that I made friends in, fell in love in, and saw some really weird puppet theatre in. But today the man I loved was flying to Israel and had mentioned his million connections.
There was no particular reason to think that Tomer flying through Turkey, but when I checked with a mutual friend, it was confirmed that he was connecting in Istanbul. It was at this moment that my low-level crying turned into full-on sobbing that felt like I was trying to vomit up my small intestines. He was fine - still in the air, and about to turn around and go back to Singapore to wait until the airport was cleared for receiving landings. As I got the messages telling me that this man was safe, I kept thanking God. Thanking God he wasn't there yet when the bombs went off, thanking God that he was unharmed, thanking God that He had spared the one I loved. But at the same time, the awful irony was all too apparent. What did it mean to thank a God for sparing some within a Creation that allowed such suffering to others? The question hung above my grateful sobs. There are too many good books on the problem that evil presents to belief in a good creator-God (see C. S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain) for this to challenge my beliefs, but this did not help me synthesise any information at that moment. Nor does it now, when I read about the recent attack in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Because this week, the world has got me beat. The hatred and fear that is fuelling political movements both in the UK and USA, the violence that has no sign of slowing down - they scare me both in their character and their apparent unanswerability. There are no rational conversations to be had because no objective good is the goal here. There is no appeal to emotion because hatred is easier to hold onto than love, especially when it comes to the 'enemy'. When I finally got to talk to Tomer on the phone hours later in Istanbul, he asked me what we could do to stop terrorism. A big question, I know, but Tomer's a bit like that - every problem has a solution, and if we don't know it yet, it's just because we haven't been thinking about it long enough. I didn't have anything to tell him about IS or the indoctrination of young minds, but I did have one other thing to tell him. Which was that, despite living on opposite sides of the globe and having shied away from it due to fear of the end, I wanted to be in a relationship with him. The life where I live in fear of losing someone I loved wasn't good enough. Even if people whose goal is to create terror indiscriminately can make me worried about being in airports and going out to bakeries and dancing at nightclubs, I truly believe that those of us who feel they can't do anything can still put love in front of fear and hatred. Maybe I'm wrong, or right but it won't make a difference, or so naively idealistic that I betray my years, but I think I'd still rather live this way.
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