Depression

It has been a month of strange bittersweet-ness as an adopted Londoner: the initial (short-lived) Olympic madness, the subsequent terrorist mess, and a bizarre wackiness of this mixture of sublime joy and horrid angst.

A budding terror – that’s what it is.

Depressing isn’t it – this horror on the streets, the edginess, the mourning, the weeping, the grief, and the realisation that it isn’t over. There is no easy synthesis; no plausible explanation; no sensible prediction. They say that life must go on. We can’t stay holed up. There’s an urgent need to defy and to win this reckless war.

But how does one win a war against terrorism? It’s easier where there’s some degree of calculated risk. Insurance companies know the drill by heart. Where fundamentalism is concerned, however, the predominant factors of control and prediction – normal parasites of risk – no longer act as indispensable constraints. It’s a dreadful thought: a game where the rules are as discerning as they are indistinct; an ideal that arises most pervasively to confront the world and life as we know it to be; a proactive reaction that perpetuates odious acts; a masked group of self-proclaimed victims and defenders of a faith which carries out orders of naked aggression and massacres in compliance with incomprehensible fanaticism - the uneducated young subscribing to, and falling for, such brainwashing.

It’s a pretentious thing, this religious fundamentalism. A fad that takes over the minds of those that engage in these acts against humanity with impunity. Is this not fundamentalism at its worst – as an excess that completely denies reality and disregards life; an ideal that is totally dependent on the whims of human nature, power, and contradiction.

And I hate it. I completely abhor fundamentalism of all sorts. Fundamentalism works on a lack of true understanding, and is oiled by an inability to rationalise. It reduces the word credibility to an all time low. Fundamentalists are like tunnel rats. They can’t see the light from different angles; everything looks straight. They breed in socially backward societies, thriving on insular concepts that are closed, racist, almost chauvinistic, passive obedience, feudalism, and fascist intolerance.

I find myself increasingly intolerant of extremist behaviour and ideals. Now, at the age of 25, I am beginning to re-evaluate what is important to me – what I think is worth fighting for or against. I have little (and shrinking) patience for religious or moral propaganda. You live your life. I live mine. My life is my creation and my responsibility. On many occasions, I have felt that Christians and Muslims alike are a bit too quick and hasty to pass judgment upon those whose viewpoints differ from theirs, especially where non-believers and dissenting views are concerned. Critical discernment of rational argument vis-à-vis taking the morality high ground within an ivory tower that rests upon hypocrisy, minimal thought maximal (and bloody conservative) belief, and rock hard stubbornness. As a lawyer, I find this particularly distasteful. And wrong.

In a sense, it is not difficult to appreciate why the existence of morality, the code of values each of us uses to decide on the choices and actions we make, is vitally relevant to our lives. In an age where the moral and legal order assumes no minimum moral consensus and appreciates moral pluralism and relativism in the field of legal consciousness, and amidst an atmosphere of uncertainty and confusion that extends even to the most basic values of human life, conflicting opinions about abortion, surrogate motherhood, homosexuality and most recently of torture and genetic engineering with the human embryo exemplify such moral perplexity. Eternal quibbling over these matters is surely a permanent fixture. But there are mainstream responses and fundamentalist responses. This is primarily a realisation that no one’s perfect; no one’s infallible; no one’s completely right. There are always divisions within any interpretation. Your vision is but one embodiment of this realisation.

For all this waffling, I think I am at a crossroad in my life. I am increasingly taking a view (though clearly not enough) of the matters that I recognise as incredibly important to me and I am increasingly willing to speak up. And I suppose there is something poignant about that as I have always been a fence-sitter: a moderate force that tries to complement and accommodate. I suppose there's another side to all this. Ori mentioned over messenger last week about how I am too complicated a person. “If I were to date you, you would be an intellectual challenge, which is very nice however at the same time might cause me a headache.” Apparently, I think too much. Frightening, isn’t it. Understandably, being complicated is a turn off. I hate drama. I hate soppiness. No one likes complication. Simple's good. It gives a straight road in life without any fudgyness of a directional choice.

But is that ideal? What would life be if everything was straight? Boring. What I dig is intelligent discourse. I’ve never been afraid to be wrong. You pick yourself up and there are things to learn throughout the process. What I do dislike, is passive agreement, which gets you nowhere and is in fact as dangerous as being wrong in the first place. I like confident people who negotiate their path in life. Mindlessness is such a disease. I’ve discovered, however, that looking stupid is a far better alternative as a means to an end vis-à-vis being terribly clever and terrifying people – the insecure sort that gets threatened by excessive and ostensible intelligence. It’s a desolate landscape for some, but no less uninhabited. I waffle sometimes.