Some time roughly three and a half months ago in March 2016, I was sitting in the hallway of one of my college’s buildings, waiting for my next class to start. I was listening to and smiling at the threads of conversation carried on by the classmates around me. It was a nice day, a good day. Then an alert from a news website happened to pop up on my phone, and I felt like the world had fallen out from under me.
A bomb.
A bomb in my hometown. Not the town that I had grown up in, but the city of Istanbul, Turkey, where my parents lived. Where they still live today. There had been a suicide bombing on Istiklal, one of the busiest streets in the city. Istiklal, a major shopping area that stretches for miles but seems to go on forever, with tall, beautiful buildings lining both sides of the street. Istiklal, a street wide enough to fit two lanes of traffic, but reserved completely for pedestrians except during the early hours of the morning. Istiklal, a street far from my parents’ house, but also a place that my father visits regularly for work or to meet friends.
Pure fear shot through me as I tried to make sense of the alert on my phone. A bomb? What? How? It didn’t make sense. Istiklal, and the whole of Istanbul, for that matter, was a place that I had been to many, many times. Bombings don’t happen in places that you know. They happen in desert cities, or places far away. They don’t rip apart the cobblestones of streets that you’ve walked along more times than you can count. It didn’t make sense.
I don’t remember much about dialing my parents’ phone number or listening and hoping that my mother would pick up and say, “No, don’t worry, honey, we’re all fine.” I don’t even remember whether she picked up or whether I had to call back and try again later. However, I do remember the fear and shock. Tears still prick in my eyes as I think about that day, and as I type this out my hands are a bit shakier on my computer keys than they usually are.
Still, life moved on. I eventually got in touch with my family and found that everyone was all right. My father had stayed home, and we didn’t even know anyone who had been hurt or killed in the Istanbul bombings in March. I went to class, mentioned it to a few of my friends who each gave me a concerned, “Oh no!” when they made the connection that my family lived in Turkey, and that was that. It was covered on the news, of course, but after all, Turkey was far away and part of “The Middle East”, which meant that there would always be war and death there, so it didn’t really matter that much. It wasn’t like it had been in an important place, like Paris or Brussels, and after all, only a handful of people had died. So even though the bombing had come less than a week after a similar attack in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, that had killed 37 people, and even though Istiklal had been a soft target and the bombing was most certainly aimed at murdering civilians and tourists, the world forgot about it.
This week, an airport in Istanbul blew up.
Three individuals, later linked to ISIS and identified as hailing from Russia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, blew themselves up one after another in the Ataturk airport parking lot, the domestic flights terminal, and at the entrance of the international flights terminal. I first heard about it from a Facebook popup prompting me to mark myself as safe after two bombs, a shooting, the confirmed deaths of at least ten people, but in the past few days the third bomber was identified and the death toll has climbed to 44, with over 200 people injured and many still in the hospital. Most were airport employees waiting for the bus home or tourists traveling through one of the busiest airports in the world.
The people killed by this attack weren’t soldiers or diplomats. They were everyday workers, students, mothers, fathers, aunts, and uncles. They were this father who was trying to rescue his son from ISIS. They were this eight-year-old girl and her aunts. They were people that could have just as easily been my parents, my brother and sister, my friends or even myself. They were people that you could have known, that could have changed the world and made it a better place. Instead, they were snuffed out.
It’s taken a few days, but we’re pretty sure that none of my friends or family were injured in the blast. I had the blessing of being in the middle of a Facebook conversation with my mother when I first learned of the attack, so I didn’t have to go through the terror that I felt when I first heard about the bombing in March. However, my heart is still broken for the people and families that were irreparably altered by this tragedy, and I’m still waiting for the world to wake up.
I’m waiting for my friends to start texting me and asking if I’m okay — if my family is safe. I’m waiting for everyone to be talking about the bombing. I’m waiting for Facebook profiles to start changing as people dye their pictures red and white to stand in solidarity with Turkey and by "wearing" the Turkish flag. I’m waiting for world leaders to step up and offer more than an, “I’m sorry, but we’ll help you investigate”. I'm waiting for the government to realize that ISIS is not on the run, it's not losing its power, and airports are still as vulnerable as they have ever been. I’m waiting for us to say, “Hey, that should never happen again. We’re going to take action so that that never happens again.” But I have the feeling that, if I keep waiting for these things, I’m going to be waiting a long time.
Today, I’m writing this article because this world is hurting my heart. I look through Facebook and browse through the news, and all I can think about is how one of my friends was passing through Ataturk not 40 hours before those bombs went off, but all I see are links to the latest dumb thing that Donald Trump said, the economic consequences to the Brexit, or a litany of faux-political memes that, more often than not, all seem to say the same thing. I appreciate those things, and I even like some of those things, but I sit wondering, “Doesn’t the world know that people died today?!”
We’re not living in a world of cat videos and crude Vines. We’re living in a world where, on June 28, 2016, three bombs went off in one of the busiest airports in Europe and barely anyone seemed to notice. Perhaps this is because I am a college student, and I am surrounded by other college students whom all have other things on their minds, but it still hurts me. I want to be able to run up to people and ask them if they heard the news, without them looking at me and wondering why I care. I don’t want the fact that I personally know people that were near an event to be an issue. I want us to care regardless. Even further, I want people to know before I even have to mention it to them. I want us to be aware of what is happening all over the world, even if the things happening are all horrible tragedies. The not-so-long-ago shooting in Orlando shook our entire nation, but are most Americans even aware of the terrorist attack that took place less than a week ago?
Truthfully, I acknowledge that my thoughts might be that of a minority of people. I realize that I’m the odd one out here because I know what it’s like to have a foot in each world. Looking around, I wonder if my peers in America would be more focused on what was going on around the world if they realized that the bombings that happen on the news are more than just a passing Facebook headline or a story on a screen. And yes, it baffles me that my life is so different from the rest of my friends — that something 5,000+ miles away feels as close as if it were next door. However, honestly, Turkey isn’t the utterly foreign place that people imagine it to be. It isn’t a desert, and it’s not a barren wasteland. Instead, it’s rolling hills and mountains embraced on three sides by seas.
It’s sparse, Mediterranean trees in the cities and spreading forests in the countryside. It’s proud, ancient structures next to bright, new buildings in cities that have existed since before the Roman Empire.
It's a member of NATO and a country that the U.S. has been friends with since 1831. It’s loud, energetic people, who might stare at you for being a foreigner, but will stop if you need help and beam at you if you show them that you’ve tried to learn some of their language.
I know I’m rambling, but I could tell you so much about Turkey... like its history or its plethora of biblical locations — from Mt. Ararat (Noah’s Ark, anyone?) to Ephesus and the rest of Revelation’s Seven Churches — or its inclusion in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, or my favorite fact about my other hometown: that Istanbul is the only city in the world that is split between two continents (Europe and Asia). I don’t even know how I know half of the details that I’ve learned about Turkey. I guess it’s hard to forget information about the things you love.
I don’t have the answer for world peace. I don’t claim to know what the U.S. should do about ISIS or war in the Middle East or gun control or even who our next president should be. However, I do know that our attitude of apathy cannot go on any longer. We owe it to the rest of the world to care about what's going on everywhere--not just in the places that seem popular at the moment. You can’t quantify the tragedy of loss of life. You can’t measure it by distance, age, method and I would even say that you shouldn’t compare using numbers. What happened in Florida was a tragedy. What happened in France and Belgium were tragedies. What happened in Turkey was a tragedy. They were all extremely horrific events, but some of those events definitely got more attention than others. Something needs to change so that things like this don't happen again, and that something starts with the acknowledgement that terrible things happen in each country of the world, and that, just because something is far away, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't mourn it as well.
I started this article by telling you some of my story, but the thought that I want to leave you with is that this could have been anyone's story. This could have been your story. Your life can change in the blink of an eye, and a person's life can vanish just as quickly.
Please, cherish the people you know and the life that you have, and love the people that you don't know, even if they are far away. I'm not asking that you move overseas or start another ice bucket challenge — I'm just asking that you become more aware of what's happening all over, and that you would say a prayer for the people in Istanbul, Turkey — my other hometown.
