Since the newspapers of the country are riven with news of floods and famine, war and greed and avarice, replete with the sort of realities that are unappealing, they insist that they do not any longer read the newspapers or watch the news. Bad news has no place in their world; if it insists, they will simply shrink the boundaries, raise the walls, and shut the gates to exclude it. What you cannot see, what is beyond your boundary wall in the home of another, is not your problem. To justify it all, they describe themselves as the positive thinkers, the optimists, superior to all the rest in their devotion to ignore the unappealing. They are truly devoted to Pakistan they say, for they are still willing to sing its praises, ignore its inadequacies.
It would be all okay, tolerable and permissive, perhaps even justifiable, if it did not take place in a country whose condition was not precisely like the heart patient with one functioning kidney. Dangling in the curious limbo between complete failure and almost survival, Pakistan is threatened at its borders and poisoned from within. If 10 years ago people mourned an hour or two of load shedding, a day or two without water, they now face hours without basic services. Anything you cannot protect with force will be taken by force — a gun deftly pointed through the window of a car, the pocket of a pant.
Amid all this, these members of the cult of positive thinking are in fact afflicted with the disease of denial. They would be surprised to learn that in countries that are doing well, those whose bounties are still robust enough to insure that water flows from taps and rooms can be heated and cooled and children can be regularly fed and vaccinated, people are not addicted to singing the paeans of the positive outlook. In these environs, where so much is right, pages and pages are devoted to criticism, the take down of habits, the dissection of governments, the failures, however few. In environments used to dissent, to detractors, you will not encounter the lobby of positive thinkers always ready and willing to assault with the buffoonery of asking, “Why not tell the positive story of Pakistan?”
To them, then, here is a final answer. To tell the positive story of Pakistan is to deny the millions who are suffering, the youth who have little hope, the unemployed who will likely struggle for all of their lives, the flood stricken who are unlikely to get respite and the victims of crime who will never get justice in a reflection of the Pakistan that they see every day. A country cannot change unless it can see a reflection of itself, and a country that insists on denying the bleak realities of its reflection is a country more diseased than it is willing to admit. If the news is grim, if the outlook is grotesque, it is because there is too much pain and too much suffering.
Hope erected on denial is always too feeble to transform, giving only the momentary respite, the convenient excuse for those whose will ultimately turn away, ignore, and deny. The hope that enables transformation is not borne on the tacky clichés of positive thinking, the artificial anointing of undeserving and accidental heroes, the gushing over a vivacity and energy that is largely imagined. The cult of positive thinking and its adherents in Pakistan, skulking on message boards and accosting all with the pointing fingers of a hollow optimism, are not the friends of hope but the enemies of reality. Nothing disrespects the suffering of others more than privileging of positive news spun out of nothing, the manufacture of artificial hope that dies before it ever lives.