Sri Lanka Easter Sunday Attacks: 2 Years On
A Personal Postmortem
Below are some thoughts that I had put down in 2019, about a month after the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka in April. I don’t know why I never published them, maybe because I felt that, as it was my personal sentiments as a mere onlooker about a very painful tragedy, I am not qualified to write about this. But given that almost Two years on, we seem to have not got any real closure on why this was done and who was responsible, I felt that I need to publish my thoughts.
There is this unspeakable and unexplainable emotional unease inside of me since all this happened, a feeling of despair and darkness. I was born in June 1983 and due to an life threatening infection soon after birth had to be kept in the Castle hospital for a month. My parents say that I was brought home in the middle of the Black July Riots. So, since I was a baby, there was always the gloom of unrest and war hanging over me and the whole of Sri Lanka. Remember everything is energy and just imagine all the collective negative energy which would have been transferred from our parents, family and each other during these times. There would have been a very powerful Negative energy transferred from my mother and father during that period because they were afraid. And I believe that despite we all tried to live Normal lives, and me growing up to be relatively sane, that feeling of fear must have been implanted and buried in my unconscious. And this feeling was around in our subconscious for 30 years, until the war was over in 2009. Fear, insecurity, anger, distrust, hate, stress, despair etc all these feelings were lying just below the surface. It was just a car cutting you off on the road away, it was a simple mistake away…one wrong move or word and we were ready to explode.
And since the war ended, during the past 10 years…this whole energy changed…slowly, one by one the collective consciousness shifted towards positive and there was a shift in energy. We become less fearful, less angry, more secure, more free (physically at least) and eventually more confident. The more confident individuals in a society or group get, the more confident the collective consciousness gets. So essentially, the more safe and secure and confident the people of Sri Lanka were getting. There were protests, media freedom, making fun of the government, the ministers, the president, the people were getting more confident and strong, the power was shifting from the Politicians to the people! And I don’t suppose that they likes it at all.
After just 10 years of peace, the people were getting Powerful…and no government wants that.
A government cannot rule over a Brave and confident people, they need a Fearful and insecure people to rule over. What better way to do that than bring them down to where they thought they’ll never go again…enter the FUD campaign. Fear…Uncertainty…Doubt - A government’s most trusted Weapons of Mass Destruction. If you tell someone Loud, Long and repeatedly enough that something is so…it is a matter of time before they start believing that it IS so.
And now when I walk on the road, when I am in bed at night, when I am in a crowded lift, that inexplicable uneasy feeling takes over my body and I don’t know why or what it is. Because my ego cannot fathom what this fear is. When I see a snake I KNOW that I am afraid because it will bite me, if someone points a gun at me I KNOW that I am scared because it can kill Me. These are all perceived as legitimate threats to our lives and we are aware of them on a conscious level. But when there is a fear inside of us which we can’t explain which we cant find a reason for…we are fucked! This is what is happening to us now. I believe that it is that fear which was buried in my unconscious 36 years ago, which was subdued for 10 years has been reactivated. It is that fear which is causing these negative feelings of fear and anxiety which we cannot explain.
But the government usually gives us someone or something to displace this fear on to, they need to fear condition us. Pavlov used a certain experiment to test his theories of conditioning. He put a bunch of cats in a bag and took them near a river and beat them. Then brought them back and let them out. He did the same thing a few more times, only this time he rang a tiny bell before he beat the cats. After some time, Pavlov did not have to beat the cats for them to be scared of him…he just had to ring the Bell, and the cats ran for their lives in anticipation of a beating.
We are the bag of cats which got beaten…and this time…the Bell is Radical Islamists…the Burqa…Sometime ago it was radical Buddhists, it was the Grease Yaka etc…different Bell…same result!
The government wants us to be scared, it wants us to feel insecure about the guy next to us, it wants us to feel helpless, it wants us to mistrust, it wants us to feel powerless…because as long as we are powerless… they have control over us. They ring the Fucking Bell!!!
Essentially, they want us to Change…change who we are, how we do things and how we treat each other. And looks like that they are succeeding. We have changed who we are because we are now afraid, we have changed how we do things because we now afraid, we are treating each other with suspicion because we are now afraid. Fear is a primal instinct focused solely on survival. That is why fear is responsible for almost all ‘emotional hijackings’.
We need to rise above this Fear, the anger, the pain and the perceived hatred and most certainly, the politics. Not because we are not angry…because we ARE! Not because we are not afraid…because we ARE! Not because we follow a certain ideology, faith or religion, not because we don’t have the right to be political, not because we can’t stand for what we believe in and certainly not because we are not hurt.
We need rise above this because, after a 30 year old Civil war…we owe to ourselves…and we owe it to each other! We owe it to all the innocent people who died and all the soldiers who died.
Bombs Kill people once…but extremism and terrorists keep killing the ones left by behind everyday. We need to mindfully look at what we have become, what we are doing and how we are treating each other.
We are all responsible!!!
Because Extremists THRIVE when Moderates just want to SURVIVE! -Thushan Jayaratne
