I want to point out that although the official title of this post included the idea that “I read it so you don’t have to”, I suggest my dedicated reading audience not take the thought seriously. This is a book I think is well worth reading. It’s the least we can all do, I think, to acknowledge the huge personal risk Samer took to get The Raqqa Diaries out of his home and onto our various bookshelves.
Plus… it’s a short book. I know we are all busy and such and this makes it difficult to find time for reading, but... we can make time to read a short book, right? I’m talking about a hundred or so pages, folks. So, pour yourself a lemonade or whatever, and enjoy…
However, I do warn the reader that it is not an easy read. There is something different about reading a book about wars, atrocities or human rights violation in the present tense because as readers we lose the comfortable barrier of the past that exists anytime we read about similar topics in a history book. In a present tense account, it isn’t possible to close the book and say well, that happened in the past, and things are different now. Unfortunately, for those readers who feel a sense of interconnection with the wider world, I think closing this book will be accompanied with a tinge of guilt about the tiny role we all have in allowing these crises to continue.
The solution is immensely complex and not one likely to come about overnight. It certainly isn’t going to come about from a TOA blog post (or even three)! I do have a hunch, however, about a good place to start. It ties back to a favorite thought from Will Durant’s Fallen Leaves that I’ve highlighted here in the past – the solution to massive problems is education, education, and education.
For those of us in privileged countries whose biggest annoyance is a daily spam from TOA, the most important task toward this goal is to learn where others are coming from when you don’t understand them or you don’t agree with them. It means learning the difference between someone who practices a religion from someone who distorts it. It means learning why someone in power would prefer to call an organization ‘The Islamic State’ instead of ‘Daesh’ and understanding why this is related to building up walls instead of knocking them down.
If getting into those topics feels too ‘big-idea’ to be relevant, that’s OK. In fact, I apologize – TOA should really be a grassroots type of thing. But I think the task is the same even if we focus on details closer to home. It shouldn’t matter whether the task involves big world issues or trivial local concerns because the task of calling things by the names they deserve is a universal mission. It means being precise with words, being consistent with actions, and leaving assumptions at home. It means fitting others into categories only as a last resort. If something happens and it’s wrong, say so, just say it’s wrong, and maybe next time you’ll have learned a little more so that you can do more than just speak up.
And reader, the next time you start thinking about what ‘those people’ or ‘these people’ do, stop, just stop, because each time you describe people in the context of some group they belong to, you’ve also incorrectly described other people who fit into the same group to whom that description has never applied. It isn’t easy now, it isn’t easy in the present when we nod in agreement about who fits into categories defined by skin tones or cartographers, but in the future this will change and maybe there will be a little less of the warmongering and chaos these categories help bring about today. This future, it isn’t quite just around the corner, but I think it’s in sight if you look for it, and I bet the fastest way to get there is to just go for it when you see it. It won’t be easy to get there, it won’t be easy in the present to think and speak in the way we expect to in the future, it won’t be easy to leave behind our past patterns of thinking and speaking because they once served us so well, but just keep in mind that no great thing like the future is ever built by doing merely what is easy.
