What Fate For the Unjust

Noran Alaa Morsi

Senior English Editor

Not all deaths are created equal. Those who burn alive with every ember screaming injustice and trauma do not lie in the same grave as they who get an entire plot of land for themselves worth multiple dollar signs. 

We plead for justice, and plead for years. Alas, the wasted blood is unseen and the mothers’ screams unheard. Those who lie on the cold hard floors as their lives bleed away; the children who had to watch their parents disappear into political oblivion or lost to blunt murder – these are made invisible. Years turn into decades, and these too pass but don’t seem long enough to satisfy the thirst for cruelty and tyranny, and remain as reminders of everything we’ve lost. What was once spring has turned into an eternal scorching summer.

“Respect the dead.” 

You’ve all misunderstood. We respect the dead’s human shortcomings, their embarrassing tendencies, their secrets. We don’t respect the dead’s bare injustices. We don’t respect the dead’s systematic undying absolutism.

Not all deaths are created equal. You die in the country’s best hospital rooms, you don’t die starving on the street, tortured in the big house or burnt alive between the tracks.

“When they respect us alive, we’ll respect them dead.”

May the martyrs rest in peace.