Always Watching Spring Through Someone Else's Perspective
Can you imagine a civilisation that built an observatory in the 13th century but discredited scientists in the 21st century?
While the world aims for the stars with science, we are still spending our days labelling each other. If you ask when we lost our way, the answer lies hidden in both our past and our present...
History records progress not only through victories, but also through reason, conscience and production.
While Ibn Sina's medical books were being studied in European universities for centuries, Al-Jazari's water machines
filled libraries in Andalusia, and we were a civilised people building ladders to the sky. The path that began with Al-Khwarizmi's discovery of zero led humanity to calculate, measure and understand.
Can you imagine a civilisation that built an observatory in the 13th century but discredited scientists in the 21st century?
While the West was experiencing the Renaissance, we were debating whether the printing press was a ‘sin’ during the Tulip Era.
While Japan became a technology giant in 30 years after the devastation of war, we were still preoccupied with ‘who is whose man.’
South Korea, which was poorer than us in the 1960s, is now a software exporter; we are still selling imported products by marketing them as local products.
Today, the world is racing to establish bases in space. Vertical gardens are being developed in agriculture, and artificial intelligence is being used in education.
But us?
We are arguing on television about who called whom a ‘traitor to the country.’
The language of politics has turned to profanity, and the language of the people has turned to hatred.
While science should be discussed across the country, the level of insults on talk shows is being discussed.
When did we lose our way?
Perhaps when Galileo was studying the sky through his telescope, and we insisted that ‘the sun does not move’...
Perhaps when Nazım Hikmet was shouting his love for his country through poetry, and we exiled him...
Perhaps when we chose to consume instead of produce, to shout instead of listen, to memorise instead of research...
But most of all,
we lost when the leader of a country's ruling party called his own people ‘scum, trash, garbage, mud, rotten, immoral, dishonourable, despicable, degenerate, and house negroes.’
That day, politics turned from serving the people to trying to bring them into line.
On that day, words called for enmity, not brotherhood.
And since that day, we have turned our backs on the developing world and turned our backs on one another.
Because a nation's future grows not through insults but through dreams.
Land not nourished by science becomes barren; a society not enlightened by conscience grows dark.
Spring will come, of course…
But it will always be watched through someone else's window.
As Nazım Hikmet said...
‘Like a tree, alone and free
And like a forest, brotherly
This longing is ours...’
