What Will You Tell Us When We Ask You: What Did You Leave For Us?

Author: Shadi Ayad

There are questions that do not end with the departure of their owners.

Questions that linger in the air between heaven and earth, waiting for the moment when a person stands before history, not before cameras.

Among the harshest of these questions:

What will you tell us when we ask you: What did you leave for us?

The question will not be about the number of trivial speeches that were made.

Nor about the number of false slogans that were raised.

Nor about the number of times love for the homeland was falsely declared.

For the homeland does not judge its children by what they said about it, even if they lied…

But by what they did for it.

A generation will come that knows none of the details of this dirty phase.

It will not carry all the small and dirty disputes.

And it will not live all the justifications that were made at each stage.

But it will see the dirty result.

And it will ask:

How did you have all these resources in your hands…

Yet, we reached this level of exhaustion?

And the truth that must not be erased from memory:

This homeland was not a poor homeland.

It was not land without resources.

And it was not a people waiting for someone to teach them how to create life.

It was a rich homeland.

Rich in money.

Rich in people.

Rich in knowledge and experience.

Rich in its men and women, in its trade, in its agriculture, in its institutions, in the minds of its children that achieved success despite all circumstances.

It was a people with the ability to build.

And the ability to rise.

And a will that long years could not break.

And it possessed something that cannot be bought:

Dignity.

And it had its stone…

That stone that was not just a stone.

It was a symbol of human will when it decides to say: I am here.

Then comes the hardest question:

What did we do with all this wealth?

For homelands do not only lose when money decreases.

They can lose when the compass is lost.

When small dirty interests become greater than big dreams.

When preserving the existing dirt becomes more important than creating the future.

Indeed, trust is not a position.

It is not a title.

It is not a time period that a person lives and then it ends.

Trust is the impact.

It is what remains after the names depart.

It is the path that the coming generation finds clearer.

It is the homeland that becomes stronger, not more exhausted.

For history does not ask:

How many times did you speak of love for the homeland “despite your lies”?

But it asks:

How did you prove this “false” love?

And it does not ask:

How long did your “disgusting” presence last?

But it asks:

What did you create during this “forced” presence?

A day will come when our children stand before this dirty phase.

They will not search for the abundance of “false” speech.

But for the truth that you do not know.

They will not ask who was most present despite their absence.

But who had the most impact.

And they will ask the question that no one can escape:

When the homeland was forcibly in your hands… what did you leave for us?

For the greatest thing a person leaves behind is not what they possess for themselves…

But what they leave for those who come after them:

A stronger homeland.

And a closer dream.

And a tomorrow worthy of all the sacrifices that preceded us.
And we only want your intervention, Sir, to save us from what has been done…