Untangling our collective chaos

The trauma that people of Bangladesh are feeling is palpable. The vulnerability and fear is real. Indeed, that is even expected. In the meantime, let's discuss why we are feeling the way we are feeling as a way to process both the attack and the events that followed.

Many of us feel that our city will never be the same again, while many are predicting a sinister "new normal."

That is perhaps because many of us are feeling horror, real horror, for the first time in our lives – especially if we've never seen anything like this before. And with it, we are feeling grief; but we don't know how to process it. We haven't learnt how to deal with grief, after all. Something as inevitable as death should be easier to process, one would think, but it isn't.

Psychotherapists often cite the Kübler-Ross model of grief (also known as the five stages of grief) in which humans go through five disparate emotions when grief stricken: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But all of these emotions, but acceptance, make us feel like we're losing control. They make us feel unlike ourselves. And we try to stop it; and therein lies the problem. We don't need to stop the feelings. The idea is to feel those feelings, understand them, and make sense of them. 

Before our collective grief turns into collective chaos. 

Because when death comes in the manner it did on July 1, in which grief combines with horror, we are at risk, in popular parlance, of "losing it."Add to that all kinds of angst. Class-based angst. Moral angst about inequality. Existential angst. All of a sudden, we have a perfect recipe for conspiracy theories based on our class/race/religious positions. 

But no matter how many conspiracies we hatch, we can't but face the reality that our children – of all walks of life – are at risk of being radicalised. Either at home or abroad. At coaching centres, at schools, and universities. And as we realise that certain groups are offering up enough incentive to the right recruits, enough to convince them that their lives are not worth living unless they prove themselves by partaking in these risky, life-threatening endeavours, let us take pause. Because the fight ahead of us is a difficult one, but one that must be won.

Without mass-surveillance.

Without impinging on freedoms.

Without help from international bodies with vested interests.

Without police brutality.

I know, it's hard to think about the macro when the micro, our children, are at stake. But without addressing the system, individuals can't be helped. I know, we want our children to know better; we want them to be able to resist such lucrative offers. Even though we haven't taught them how. And, maybe, that guilt adds to the grief and the horror that we currently feel.

Maybe some of us can laud ourselves for being human because in the post-attack period we have found it in ourselves to be sympathetic to the families of the attackers. 

But only to the ones with upper-middle class backgrounds.

The parents of the attacker from rural Bogra somehow don't deserve our sympathy. So we sit silently as they get arrested. 

Maybe we maintain this silence because it's easy to fit the narrative that individuals from disadvantaged groups are more susceptible to being radicalised in exchange of money and/or other resources. We like that narrative. It protects our middle-class sentiments. It protects our children, too, for the most part. And even when they end up being killers, we blame radicalisation. Not class. Not class-privilege. Not entitlement. Not even them. Or their vacuous lives that make them yearn for meaning. Maybe some of us have even convinced ourselves that they are outliers. But they're not. The world's most famous terrorist, Osama bin Laden, was a very rich man, after all (and he's no outlier either).

But we're not new to disproportionate experiences based on class. So when class dynamics unfolded in the aftermath of the attacks, we yet again remained silent.  We watched as Saiful, the pizza chef who died during Operation Thunderbolt, was first identified as one of the attackers, and then, when it was revealed that he was one of the victims of the tragedy, quickly forgotten. He remains the only one who didn't get national honour. Perhaps the injustice of the situation adds to the horror, grief, and guilt.

Maybe this "terror attack" is particularly horrific for us because we can see that they're  (whoever they are) fighting a war. An ideological war. A war with foot soldiers consisting of our children. They want an Islamic state run using their version of Islam.

We can keep saying that IS is actually anti-Islamic State. We can say that IS is responsible for killing millions of Muslims. We can say IS has created Islamophobia. Indeed, we can say IS and its franchisees are in the business of defiling Islam – not promoting Islam. 

But we also know that such truths don't matter.

Not in a country where the Quran is read but not understood by a majority of the people who read it; where reading translations are often thought to "not count" because it's not in Arabic. IS clearly likes this special brand of Muslims who don't understand Islam, because they can then feed them their own version. And maybe that knowledge comes together with the horror, grief, guilt, and injustice to create the collective chaos that we find ourselves immersed in.

The writer is Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work, University at Buffalo.