I have been wanting to start writing about things I see, I
hear, I feel and didn’t realize the first thing that really prompted me to
write the first article is the Paris attack.
There are two things coming out of it that keeps me thinking.
First of all, the first thing that came to my mind was
GOD. Where was He? Or more like what was He thinking on the
sideline? I had a lot of questions – we have
prayed to God for little things and we trusted and have witnessed His
deliverance. What have we done
differently on things like this? Is it
because that we haven’t prayed for world peace enough? Is it because of the free will that He has
given to every mankind that when people take it to the level such as this, He
has to (painfully) let people experience the consequence of it? I never doubt of His presence nor His
ability. And I think it’s okay to ask (it’s different
from “question”) why. One thing I realize
is how little I understand Him. While I
can easily park this into the “mystery_God_does_not_plan_for_us_to_understand”
lot, there is a lot I can actually learn from the Old Testament. Please help me know You better, please help
me understand all these and what You want me to take away from these. While as Christians we don’t fear death, no
one should be put through terror to die.
I know more people will question Your existence, or Your love. I hope more will come to see You through all
these. The Sunday morning after the
attacks, there was this song I sang for the first time. I don’t remember the name of the song, but it
talked about calling upon the Kingdom to come.
I was tearing up. Yes, please –
may Your Kingdom come upon every corner and let You be known to all the lost
souls!
The second thing that has got me thinking is this thing that
has since crawled up the traffic in social media saying why people all mourn
for Paris but not Beirut. I asked myself
– are we really biased like people say, because there are Caucasians in the
casualty that it worths the mourning and attention more so than similar deaths in
other parts of the world? I don’t think
so. People tend to get really sensitive
over these things and flood the internet with their theories; but we should
always discern why we choose to do what.
There are so many accidents, massacres, terrorist attacks occurring
around the world (sadly). The reason
some incidents hit home more so than the others are because 1. People relate to
it. When all the sudden, a terrorist
attack happens in a place I have been to, of course I’m more concerned. The memories of us walking on the streets of
Paris at night, and dining in this awesome restaurant we discovered on the
street came back to me as I read the news (as it turns out we were in district
12 which is not where the attacks occurred).
But see, many of these so called main media outlets are made up of
people / countries who are closely related to this place, who have friends and
family, who have likely travelled to this place and they would naturally feel
the pain (considering Paris is such a highly travelled city). If there is a Chinese or Canadian casualty in
there, it aches my heart more. The same
with the incidents in Thailand, in the Philippines in the last few years – because
those are places where people from my home country were affected, I was torn by
that. The HK news had intense coverage
of them. But I don’t expect CNN / BBC to
be all over it. 2. People feel the
proximity to it. In Canada for instance,
Trudeau is promising taking on 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of the year. We as citizens should know what it means and know
where we should stand on this issue. Other
countries have been talking about similar issue. It is reasonable for these citizens to be
concerned about what will unfold about these terrorists, and if that can
potentially be a threat in their own country.
And adding to that, these media outlets or these countries that are
showing support just happen to be more accessible and transparent to the rest
of the world, making people thinking that everybody is just talking about Paris
not Beirut. In reality though, they are
media outlets (think CNN, BBC, Twitter, Facebook, Google etc.) that belong to a
country. They shouldn’t be wrongly represented
as a global news media and be judged accordingly. Every news media has a reason to be biased
towards certain events in the world because of how their country and people
relate to it. Let’s be reasonable on
that than jumping into these unfair conclusions. It’s saddening to hear about any of these
tragedies wherever they are, and it feels worse when you can relate to it.
