VOF Week 3: (What scares me is your reaction)

I realize mind is dangerous sometimes. It moves people to certain act. Good actions come from beautiful minds, to the contrary, harmful manner come from terrifying thoughts. Knowing beautiful thoughts, enlights me, but horrible one scares me. This is what retreat me from blogging sometimes, reading a perilous reaction, though I keep challenging my self to the thinking by keep writing.

It is not because I do not respect different opinions and diversity of school, but rather, to know someone’s mind and imagining what they capable of, frightens me. Many times, those horrified thoughts belong not to a stranger but your own friends.

One day, I wrote a comment on a friend’s posting about recent Palestine and Israel Conflict. I understood the posting was a racist one; it evoked hates toward the Jews. Not that I am agreeing with the conflict and the aggressive action, but I believe, racism triggering more violence. Not that I am not condemning all the killings, but malicious messages do not get things better. So, I made a comment about the writing, said that my friend should check all the -what he claimed as- facts that he wrote, the correlation to the conflict and the impact of the writing, whether it brings peace or cause more hate. I suggested another kind of writing.

My comment was answered by other emotional comments from friends. Implicitly, they were saying that I, as a non moslem, do not understand how it feels to have your brothers and sisters in faith got killed by those people who’s place is in hell. The Israelis and the power behind them – the US - should be killed. In Indonesia, the largest moslem country in the world, the conflict translated by the majority as a religious conflict and the US as the representation of a non moslem world. That made me, part of the non moslem world, part of the US, deserve to be killed. I imagine them killing me, and this imagination become so real if I remember the fact that we had big religious conflict outbreaks several times. And as I replied to those messages, I was thinking, do these people whom I consider as friends understand how I feel as part of minority in our nation, sense intimidation in my homeland because of some politicized non religious conflict?

In spite of my fear, I keep writing. Even though I am afraid of those horrible thinking, I keep writing, now and tomorrow. I bear in mind, that to counter those horrible thinking is exactly why I write, though I must admit I worry sometimes. And when I do, as I gather my strength, I recall a line from Irshad Manji’s book, a feminist moslem, saying that courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the recognition that some things are more important than fear. So here I am, writing and keep writing, now and tomorrow, though sometimes, I worry.