In order to not feel ashamed tomorrow...
While caskets with the flag wrapped around them are laid to rest every day, the number of martyrs is now in the double digits. The bodies of civilians are kept in deep freezers; children are watching the bloodbath on the streets.
Society is agonizing in despair. Three or four people there, five or ten people here continue calling for peace in the hope that maybe someone will hear.
Some others on the other hand, under the name of “protesting martyr funerals” are threatening the lives of Kurdish citizens with stones, clubs and weapons in their hands.
They stabbed a 21-year-old youth in the heart because they heard him speak Kurdish. They blocked roads and ripped apart the plates of vehicles that bore numbers of eastern provinces. They attacked the businesses of Kurds. They torched the houses and vehicles of Kurdish workers.
They are the unconscious people who think they love their country by burning the places where people earn their living, by lynching them. They are the ones we remember very well from various periods of history.
The polarization policies adopted to consolidate votes have brought the country to this point.
Hostilities and wars are re-adapted and presented to society. Brains are washed with nationalism propaganda. The fire of revenge is fueled by speeches. Sentimental connections are trying to be made with collective fears. A public hate is created. Those people who are against war are treated as terrorists.
As if it was the only way to love your country, those who do not act with deep nationalistic feelings are told to “Leave the country.” There is an attempted alienation from society directed at those who do not embrace certain designed “sensitivities” with equal intensity and those who doubt pro-violence politics and acts. Moreover, it is wished they cease to exit.
A member of the ruling party was shouting, “You will pack and go away!” at the entrance of the newspaper I am working at. The mob accompanying him with stones and clubs were physically attacking the newspaper building.
And this deputy was on television the next day as if nothing had happened, as if there was no flaw in those scenes, speaking that a “democratic right” had been used and that people should get used to it.
The society in Turkey should immediately probe the cause and effect relationship of incidents. We should focus on the reasons creating these results instead of succumbing to fear, pain and rage.
Certain people are expecting that society will become desperate and take shelter in those who say they are the remedy. They want society to be passive. Others are hoping they will fill the void created by this chaos.
In these days when the meanings of concepts are rapidly emptied, on the road that incites physical attacks, some people stigmatized, labeled and demonized others continuously. In many segments of society, this labelling, stigmatizing and demonizing trend is continuing.
In order to be able to understand the destruction this unconscious state of affairs will cause, we do not necessarily need to live through it. It is not too far away; we can take a look at 60 years ago for instance. The erosion created in our humanity and in our culture by the Sept. 6 and 7, 1955, incidents which were fed from the same vein are out there. Can this country endure one more?
While we were together we were more beautiful; while we were in unity we were stronger. In the case that a similar rupture is experienced, then what do we have left?
What do we earn from making those who will live on this soil 60 years from now be ashamed of the acts perpetrated by us 60 years ago?
Those who assume they own the place because they have a proxy, those who use the camouflage of patriotism for their hostility and hatred…
The country is not the property of anyone and loving it is nothing like that.
You only love your own self. Or, you do not know what love is.