Darkside Rainbow

Today is not a day to discuss gay news.

Today is a day to discuss world news, and the death of a woman who accomplished many things in her life and will now influence even more in her death.

If you’ve kept even one ear open to the news, you know that yesterday former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, killed by a bullet to the neck before a suicide bomber detonated near her vehicle, killing at least twenty other people at the election rally she’d attended. Bhutto was the first democratically elected female PM of Pakistan, and a voice of opposition against other Pakistani political leaders.

Her death has sparked worldwide concern over the fate of elections, Pakistani democracy, and even the overall stability of a nuclear-armed country - and has thrown Pakistan into chaos. Over a dozen have died in protests and riots; buildings and vehicles have been bombed, burned, and ransacked. Police have been called out in force to suppress violence. Supporters are already pointing fingers and handing out political propaganda accusing her rivals, including Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. The grief and anger of a nation are felt on every street, in every home. Across the globe, people hold their breaths and wait for the tide of chaos to ebb, to see what will remain washed up on shore.

Bhutto’s life was one of turmoil and unrest as she sailed through unstable and even dangerous political seas. She represented change and progress - but even more, she represented choice. In her absence and with her strongest rival boycotting the elections after her death, there will be little choice for the Pakistani people and the upcoming elections will border on a farce.

Here in the United States we watch, we listen to the statements of our president, and many of us find it difficult to comprehend that the death of one woman could possibly change the political tenor of an entire country. We thank whatever deity we believe in that such things rarely happen here. We cross ourselves and pray that Pakistan’s unrest will not spread to touch our shores, and whisper over nuclear capability in what-if situations that change little but that make us feel as if we’re “on top of things” by discussing them. Little in our world has changed. Little in our world would change, if we found ourselves in the same situation.

If Hillary Clinton was assassinated before the 2008 presidential election and the nation suspected rival Mike Huckabee, we wouldn’t riot in the streets. We wouldn’t protest. Very few of us would take action at all. We would press our fat, soft fingers to our mouths and make distressed noises. We would stand on our soapboxes and preach angrily, and yet rally to do nothing. We would talk about it over business lunches and coffee breaks. We would point fingers from the comfort of our sofas and wait for the television to tell us who did it, to give us our neatly-packaged daily dose of current events. We would obey any edict that our governing bodies laid out, and accept their promises that they would handle everything even if we didn’t quite believe it. In a nation of millions only a small few would gather to raise their voices, to speak their hearts and minds - and they would quickly be silenced and sent to their homes by police officers, riot armor at the ready.

Why? Because we are complacent, compliant, and even a little afraid. We are afraid to lose the comforts of our lives, and know that the death of but one politician cannot strip the nation of said comforts - but the acts of one in response to that death can strip that individual of his or her possessions, freedom, possibly even their life. We weep in the name of patriotism, but these are no longer the days of JFK. We feel little for our leaders. They are neither beloved nor trusted. Most people don’t even know exactly what it is they do, or care. This is not the nation of our fathers.

And this is not Pakistan, where the silencing of a single voice can change the political face of an entire country - where the death of one woman can shape the lives of a nation.

You can view this in whatever light you want, positive or negative. You can say that we’ve grown apathetic, or you can say that we are stable. You can say we’re blind followers, or you can say that we have faith in the process, and that our nation is so large and so secure that not even the death of a major political figure could shake it beyond dominating news headlines and initiating changes in federal security policy that the people would have little say in. We are safe from riots, and from mass violence. We are safe from everything, because we are everything and while headlines are interesting, we’re more worried about making it to work on what little gas is left in the tank. We play the short game, the nine to five, the game of life and all its minutiae. We are the trees, and we rarely take notice of our existence as part of a greater arboreal entity that is comprised by us and yet at the same time encompasses us.

We are people of small lives and small concerns - but our nation is a large and slow-moving beast, ponderous and difficult to sway in its path, often little caring for what other creatures it tramples underfoot.

And I think that, even if we could see clearly that our path wound its way towards a long and unforgiving cliff, very few of us would try to change the beast’s direction.

Would you?

benazir bhutto assassinated, pakistan, pakistani president pervez musharraf, nawaz sharif