In Search of A Better World by Payam Akhavan

Author:Payam Akhavan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2017-09-01T18:24:31+00:00

FOUR

THE ONENESS OF HUMANKIND

OF ONE ESSENCE

“ALL CIRCUITS ARE BUSY. Please try your call again.” On any other day, that would have been an annoying message, made worse by the cordial voice of that anonymous woman who taunts irritated callers around the world with a mocking tone of polite ridicule. One of the fundamental rites of passage in modern society is to suffer the on-hold hell of automated telephone systems; condescending recordings telling us that the next available customer service agent will be with us “shortly,” while for nearly an hour, we listen to a never-­ending loop of Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers singing “Islands in the Stream.” But on that day, instead of exasperation, the impersonal telephone rebuff gave rise to panic and desperation.

“All circuits are busy.” I listened to the recording repeatedly, as I obsessively dialled her number again and again. I was in utter disbelief at what had just happened. I was frantic to hear the voice of my wife and two-year-old son so that the nightmare of uncertainty would end. I just wanted to know that they were still alive. I thought of the joyous day he was born. His wondrous eyes were wide open, brimming with curiosity about the new world he had just entered. He had grown so quickly. He was now an adorable toddler, waddling around the house in pursuit of mischief, skillfully deploying his disarming smile with malice aforethought to undermine my fatherly authority. Shortly after I had kissed him goodbye that morning on my way to work, he had taken the train to Manhattan with his mother and grandparents. They were on their way to the World Trade Center, and now their whereabouts were unknown. The date was September 11, 2001, the dawn of a new millennium.

The horror of that day marked a turning point in history. Shocked by the scale of the terrorist attack, America declared a “War on Terror.” The narrative that emerged was a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West, of destroying foreign extremists before they destroyed us. But unlike the enemies from wars past, this one was everywhere, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the double-­decker buses of London. With drone warfare and suicide bombing, surveillance and xenophobia, apocalyptic survivalism became the new norm. I had witnessed in war zones throughout the world the deceptive power of visceral fear, the immediate need for self-defence blinding us to the search for lasting solutions. Like someone addicted to an unhealthy lifestyle, the world found it easier to fixate on symptoms than to deal with root causes. The single indivisible body that we call humankind was ingesting poison long before the outbreak of 9/11. The toxic combination of divisive ideologies and cynical geopolitical calculations was the perfect breeding ground for the disease of violent extremism. Amidst the hysterical belligerence, the most important narrative — that of inextricable global interdependence — was all but lost. If we appreciate that the oneness of humankind is an inescapable reality rather than a

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