Life Outside My Own Mind

Part of my effort at a full recovery from my personal losses and traumas, I have decided, is to get back to my writing and trying to focus the majority of my musings upon what is happening outside my own ongoing experiences - be they painful or otherwise - and get back into the world again, so to speak. There are two things I will be working on here in my blog that I don't know will be of interest to others, but will be the springboard for my attempt to make as full a recovery as possible from the loss of my younger sister; firstly, I have decided that as a nod to our new and historically very significant president I am going to try to answer the questions that are required of all who wish to apply for work with the Obama administration in Washington, D.C. and, secondly, to try to highlight the actions of certain people who I have found to have been particularly laudatory or that have inspired or moved me greatly. In this way I hope to honor both the period of time we are living through right now in the United States and to bring a little more recognition, however singularly unimportant and humble my efforts may be, to some of those people whose triumphs of spirit and bravery in the face of extreme persecution or threat have touched my mind and heart and left me feeling the type of inadequacy that may one day, hopefully, lead to greater and more generous actions on my part - that I might emulate while never truly equaling these individuals is all I feel I can realistically hope for, but at least I can remember them and try.

I would like to start this project by mentioning the name of one Shamsudin Agha, a mullah in Afghanistan who was brutally murdered by members of the Taliban for speaking out against the use of suicide bombings as a weapon of war. Mullah Agha lead his followers in prayer for the cessation of such practices and, as a result, was kidnapped and visciously, savagely slaughtered by those who would, as always, send others to die in order to insure their own political strength and financial and familial well-being. I have yet to hear that any of the children, family members, or good friends of those higher up in the Taliban have ever been the ones chosen to carry Jihad to the common people and infidels. This is a task in which no well known names are listed, ever, and in which only those too weak to withstand the political and religious manipulations of those determined to remain alive and in charge by any means possible are the victims with the bombs strapped to their bodies; dying in fear for promises no one knows will, or can, be kept - both for in this life and beyond, the last being a matter of faith and the former whatever the chosen sacrifices are promised or threatened with if they do not comply.

Perhaps the Mullah would have hated me on principle. I am, after all, American, culturally Christian, and female which damns me on three fronts in Muslim society, however I cannot help but recognize the bravery, the sheer courage, it took this man to offer any sort of a public protest to what has been going on in his nation for these many years. Whether it excites negative comments and emotions or not, I would like to express the feeling that it is courage such as this, the courage that governments yearn to inspire in their citizens and then hope to control absolutely, that has won wars, our own American forefathers and patriots being prime examples of both the leaders in such courage as well as inspirers and manipulators of the same.

If there is truly any justice in some ethereal afterlife for such people, I know it will not be a life that allows them to sit back without a care, but one that allows them to keep on fighting for what is true and what is right and just. Heaven, for me, would be unbearably dull with nothing except my own comfort to think about or concern me. I hope the Mullah would agree.

So, this diatribe is in honor of Shamsudin Agha, a man of genuine courage and compassion whose conscience would not allow him to remain silent and who consequently was murdered by those he stood against. May he, by such a death, become an impenetrable wall of stone to those who killed him in defense of their own selfish interests and viscious determinations.

With much love and gratitude,
Izzlebug