The Assassination of a Country's Dreams

They say that a country begins its descent into annihilation once immorality starts spreading like rot from the inside out. Pakistan has been walking this tightrope for decades now, running around in circles like a dog chasing its own tail. I have no intention of recapping history here - all the facts are already well known. I'm only thinking of my own future and the future of my family - what sort of a Pakistan will we see going forward? How much longer will I have to spend justifying whatever is happening in Pakistan to people abroad? My country is a plane crash that should have happened a long long time ago. The fact that it hasn't is a sign of sheer benevolence from the One above. He keeps giving us one more pass, one more chance to checkmate, one more opportunity towards redemption, and we keep throwing it away, chucking it into the fireplace. Sooner or later, He's going to stop giving…

We can't blame it all on our leaders though, can we? Sure, we can make the argument that no leader Pakistan has seen has had enough integrity and vision to carry this country forward. Zia assassinated Bhutto, crippled our chances for democracy through his never-ending martial law, fanned Islamic extremism and took the country literally nowhere. He had no intentions of a new direction either - it was only a bomb in his plane (God bless his soul) that gave the country a different direction.

Not that democracy was much of a new direction - the country's decade of elected leaders didn't give us much either did it? Apart from allegations of corruption, villas in Spain, Swiss bank accounts with the country's laundered money, the country pretty much stood stagnant during those years, rotting like water in a swamp. It took Musharraf's military coup to change the country's direction again.

Isn't it ironic that Pakistan's only hope of progress has been through coups and assassinations?

The fact is that I'm tired of my country's volatility. I'm tired of defending all messed up things our leaders do. And I'm dead tired of the looks I see on the faces of some people after they've read news of us messing up yet again. I hide my country's shortcomings like a father might stow away an illegal child, and yet the more I hide them, the more they seem to assert their presence.

But the fact is that I'm as bad as the rest of the Pakistani population, aren't I? I'm part of the clique of people that are all talk and no action - who love rhetoric but are too lazy to get off their asses. The truth is that nobody can blame it all on leaders - a country's leaders are only as good as its people, after all. This country's problems begin in the psyche of its people. Corruption always spreads from the inside out, whether it be a rotting carcass or a country in the process of decay. And I think symptoms of this are most visible to somebody who comes to this country from abroad - who has seen a different mindset and therefore has a more uninfluenced perspective.

One clear symptom is the Pakistani preclivity for outsmarting each other. While its prevalence differs among social strata, it's nonetheless engrained deep into the common man's psyche. The better man is always one who can outsmart the other, pull a fast one without the other even realizing what happened. That's what happens at the grassroot level, and if you think about it, that's pretty much what's happened with our leaders. If all the rumors of corruption and embezzling funds are even remotely true, our leaders have always put themselves before country, and they've done it in such a way that even to this day, they have a massive following. People came out in flocks to welcome Nawaz Sharif and Benazir, didn't they?

How much better can you get at outsmarting somebody?