Unsaid

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

-Constitution of the United States- First Amendment

We are supposedly given the right to speak freely, to protest, and immunity to be protected even if written what is against the government’s wishes. Still, people get arrested in ICE protests. International students face undercover police operations for posting their opposing views on war, and the immigration processes stop when the “King” of the state wishes so. 

Yet, I come from a country where basic human rights are seen as far too impossible to reach. So much so that every day I must be grateful that I didn’t die under a terrorist attack, grateful I’m given the right to exist in public despite being a woman, and that I can sleep with my stomach full of what I could have to eat. Of course, at a higher level, I can list education, independent choice of grooming unrelated to religious beliefs, and a job for my parents.

 But so far, I have lived in this country for almost 4 years now, and God knows I don’t belong to a country, but a given geographic map in which the rulers want my ethnicity off the surface of the earth, and have tried mass genocides, by which I doubt my choice of the phrase “my country”. 

It reminds me of when I heard “Wherever we live is our country. Every city that we are in is our city.” I either heard from my father or the masjid sheikh. 

I wonder whether I can belong to a country that shelters me but doesn’t guarantee till when, or how I’m a citizen of a country in which my ethnicity and existence are denied and unwelcome? 

Maybe I can choose to stick with one when secretly also thinking of the other, but which struggle am I capable of speaking of when both are such stimulants of my life, and unfavored by the government that can choose my faith?

Will we writers, poets, artists, musicians share too much of the disturbance of what we see that numbs people the way it numbed me? People are already exposed to such cruelties; they are numb in their own special ways. 

In a world where some voices are shared but no actions are taken, all we do is to continuously suffer in what we acknowledge as wrong, but it’s not beneficial and doesn’t match the aesthetic of our lives to connect to it, any move that might ostracize us from the norms of how we grew up.  

But to close the loop? The loop never ends until a formal action is taken, enforced by “We the People of the United States.”