The cost of sin
Religious or not, few of us ever bother to contemplate what the true cost of sin is. As long as we think we have time on our side, we have little reason to dwell on such ‘minor’ inconveniences. In truth, however, time is on no one’s side. If there is one certainty about time, it is that it will pass. If there is one certainty about life, it is that it too will pass. And when our mortality finally beckons, whatever one’s thoughts one what comes after may be, our sins will haunt us with the question: “Was it all worth it?” Because whatever gains may tempt us when death seems distant, they like all existence will only ever be fleeting.
In 2013, a former army photographer smuggled tens of thousands of photos that depicted the scale of brutality in Syria’s infamous government-run torture chambers. Despite the widespread uproar the photos triggered when initially made public, the victims they depicted are finally being identified only now, some seven years later. For many families that have longed for closure for the better part of the previous decade, learning what happened to their loved ones in detention feels worse than death itself. “They killed us twice: when they arrested him... and the second time when we saw the pictures,” the father of one of the victims was quoted as saying.
Indeed, the pictures themselves and the stories that accompany them are extremely harrowing to go through. One victim, for instance, was a mere 14-year-old arrested en route to his mother’s funeral for the ‘crime’ of having an anti-Assad song on his cellphone. The only solace, if any, the surviving loved ones of these thousands lost to inhumanity can take is that their suffering, at least, has finally ended. The perpetrators of this unspoken brutality, however, will sooner or later have to ask themselves: “Was it all worth it?”
Published in The Express Tribune, August 11th, 2020.
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