Fiction
Ep.04
“Israeli army strips and blindfolds Palestinian hospital patients and staff in north Gaza”
An image is circulating through the internet, showing how the Israeli armies stripped and blindfolded patients and staffs in north Gaza; some of them are seen in crutches whilst cuffed and another holding surgical drains attached to his body.
My question here is - where has the humanity in this world come down at? I’m not even saying this is the worst thing they ever did, as we all know. There has been months of brutality on them and it’s yet still going on. This news is no more painful to hear than receiving pieces of their own family’s body in bags. Is there anything that can be worse than that?
The reason why seeing this image hit me is the fact that it drew a perfect illustration in my mind on something I’ve read before. It was the book “Flawed” by Cecelia Ahern. It has a sequel Perfect which carries on with the story. I wish there was an actual picture of what I’m talking about, but I’ll try to draw a close to vivid image of it.
The story follows along this social system where people are to be branded “flawed” if they are to do anything imperfect in the society. Naming - lying, theft, crime, betrayal and etcetera such. This system is carried out by Whistleblowers arriving in their infamous Jeep-like white vehicles with a red siren blaring on top. These whistleblowers here almost represent the police, but in a different font. It didn’t matter how they got to know about someone lying to another, but the vile sound of those sirens approaching one’s residence was enough to drain the color out of the family’s face, and the neighbors crowding to see the drama or counting days til it’s them. This system might actually sound perfect in a perfect imaginable world where there’s no wrongdoings and bad people getting away with it; however, it’s anything but close to that. This system, as same as many we have seen, also follows injustice, nepotism and yada yada. People often gets wrongly accused of doing something, and whatever they have to explain is just silenced. They’re then branded an “F” in a perfect circle, on selective body part(s) with a carved hot iron - the type people use to seal an instituition’s or a brand’s logo on a paper. It’s as painful to the flesh as it sounds, and they’re then supposed to live with this scar for the rest of their lives.
So this was just the outline of the entire story, and I can really just talk about it the entire day, so I’ll rather keep it til there. Now, there was a scene in the sequel Perfect, where these “flawed” people are taken to the big infamous palace and are supposed to strip, just wearing the bare minimum outwear provided by them, and march from there around the entire city in lines cuffed by rope. It’s exactly what we can see in the above picture of north Gaza. How insane is that?
This story, Flawed, is actually a fictional novel. A dystopian novel. This is a story that came from an imaginative societal system where it’s hell-like, just as fictional as vampires, witches, fairies and sirens. But turns out even if this world cannot portray lives as a fairytale utopia, it certainly can show itself exactly as same as a dystopian story. Ever heard of someone telling you to not expect unicorns and rainbows in life cause it’s fictional ? Why not if you certainly do live in a dystopian world like this, which is also fictional?
Guess non-fiction is just the to-be trailer of fiction.
