Opinion | As the concrete of the world comes apart, I hope for more flowers in the cracks

I will here describe the elephant — the world — as I perceive it from my vantage point in Lahore, Pakistan, in the hope that this will be of some use to you, in the place where you are.

The first thing that strikes me about the world is that it is has become poisonous. We cannot breathe. From November until February, the blue sky is hidden behind a low ceiling of gray. This is not from clouds but from smoke. It is uncanny to take a flight in these months, to burst only seconds after takeoff into the blindingly bright light and see not a city but a gray blanket below. The cooler months used to be months of outdoor sports and running around with my cousins and shielding eyes with the blades of our hands from the sun. Now they are months when the land receives too little heat to push the smoke into the heavens, and so it settles all over the riverine plains, prevented from proceeding north by the mass of the Himalayas, choking us.

My children are not permitted to do outdoor sports in these months. Indoors, they sleep to the whirring sound of air purifiers, machines I had not imagined until recently. When we played in the winter as children, we would quench our thirst by working the shaft of the hand-pump in my grandparents’ house. Now, our children do not go out to play. The hand-pumps are all dry. We have depleted the aquifer. A machine bore is required to obtain water from hundreds of meters down, and that water too has been contaminated. Our world has become poisonous: The fireflies are gone, the children cough like smokers, the water is full of heavy metals. The economic miracle we have been promised has arrived, and it is a miracle of despoliation.

The other thing that strikes me about the world is that it has become brutal. Perhaps people have always been slaughtered the way that people in Gaza are being slaughtered. My children watch, on their devices, Gazan children speak of dead parents and siblings and teachers and neighbors. My children come home from school and ask: “What can we do? What can we do?” They post flags and images of solidarity on social media. They share songs and stories. They wave and get excited when they see a rickshaw or a stall with a message of support for the people of Palestine. My daughter is fasting this month, and we discuss the contrast between the voluntary exposure of a person to daily hunger and the experience of famine. We raise money for refugee relief and reconstructive surgeries and family exit fees.

Perhaps people have always been slaughtered like this. But have they always been slaughtered with such hypocrisy? Have those who protest for peace and equality and human rights ever been so vilified and subjected to threats — of a lost job, a lost chance at citizenship, a suspension from university — by such powerful actors in such powerful countries, countries that claim to stand for these very values? Perhaps they have: I was not alive when British colonial officers ordered the gunning down of peaceful protesters in Amritsar, or when American police officers attacked peaceful protesters in Selma. But the hypocrisy and silence of the powerful regarding the massacres in Gaza feels new to me. It feels new to my children, too. I watch them as they reject the moral trajectory of the world. I watch them as they reject even certain soft drinks and hamburgers, tainted by association.

When I perceive the elephant, I perceive poison and brutality. I perceive love and kindness and beauty, too, but these things emerge like flowers from cracks in concrete. I take pleasure and sustenance from the flowers. But then I wonder, why did our world government lead us on this path to the laying down of so much concrete?

A world government is often thought of as a fantasy, dystopian or utopian, depending on how it is imagined and by whom it is beheld, but regardless as something we situate in the future. The truth, however, is that it belongs in the recent past. For we have had a world government, the first of its kind, and that world government was the United States. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of Kabul, America played a role in governing the world that was unprecedented — unprecedented but also now ending. Ending because too many Americans do not want America to play that role and because too many non-Americans do not want America to play that role, and as that role ends, so does the world that role made possible.

Amid the poison and brutality, I feel a widespread longing for that end to come quickly, for there soon to be much less concrete and many more spaces, many more cracks. The hope, perhaps forlorn, is that flowers may emerge from at least some of these cracks. Whether flowers are what we will get, we do not know. Much worse might come. But my sense is, in the parts of the world I see around me, here in Lahore and also on my travels, that vast numbers of people feel the time has come to imagine, to try something else.