A Letter from My Broken Mind

To a world gone mad,

I’m disappointed in you, at least a part of me is—the part of me that still had dreams for you; dreams of tomorrows better than yesterdays. I knew you were violent; images of your violence are so imprinted into my memory that I still see them when I close my eyes. I knew you were cruel; you proved this to me every day by way of my father’s exile, keeping him from family and homeland by the vast ocean of unnatural circumstance. Yet, somehow I didn’t know you were merciless. Maybe I should have. You certainly didn’t spare me much pain, neither on account of the faith that lives in my heart, or the blood that flows through my veins and across time and continents. Still, I thought there was a line, one you promised not to cross—one which, once crossed, would lead to an all-out assault on my very existence. I was naïve. As history well knows, you move lines to and fro carelessly with a strike of your pen; they mean nothing to you.

So, maybe I shouldn’t be so shocked by how idly you perpetuate and accept as necessary the mass killings of my people, in lands the names of which run so long, they deplete my pen of ink. What is it about us that stirs such hatred in you? And don’t say it’s mutual—for we both know that is a lie. Bernard Lewis’s musings on the Clash of Civilizations has long been revealed to be nothing more than racist and trite projection. We are not clashing, and the only roots of my rage come from the tree that you planted.

Some amongst us have given you the benefit of the doubt, heralding your ignorance, but if you feigned honesty for once, you might admit you don’t care to know me or my family. Your lack of knowledge is willful, and your open hatred is with intention.

All cards on the table—where does that leave us? We will never match your wanton destruction or well-practiced apathy, so perhaps we will always lose. Perhaps our fate on this earth will always, in some way, be in your hands. What then will you do to us? Will you kill us all? Will you displace us to lands run by your puppets, leaving us to die by each other’s hands? Or perhaps, as my long imprisoned child-self reassures me though quiet whispers in the growing darkness, you will change.  That before your strike your final blow, you’ll look into our eyes and see in one glance your reflection—a vision of unbridled, untempered hatred—and in another, you’ll see a people—a people not so different, a people longing for nothing more than life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Sound familiar?

With love, from,

my broken mind