I have been away for 5 months. Away from blogging. Several blog-worthy things happened in those 5 months. Sri Lankans said yes to 19, the Irish said yes to gay marriage, David Cameron embraced victory, Birdman won Best Picture and Nepal lost 8,000 lives overnight. Atop all of that, ISIS is still up on its feet, the Rohingyas endure the unendurable, African refugees are left to die stranded in European waters and Black kids are robbed of their “American Dream” everyday.
Think about it, what is more intriguing in the world stage than a political win, a show of democracy, a brilliant work of art or even a devastating earthquake? A single horrifying, blood-curdling act of one man against another whom he deems inferior.
Racial profiling and inequity, religious violence and extremism, ethnic and political discrimination and every other form of divisive machinations have troubled humans since the beginning of time. They have been around for centuries and they will prevail for centuries more to come, if we don’t do anything about it.
Take us, Sri Lankans, for instance. 20 million in numbers, a strikingly minuscule population dwarfed by the world’s 7 billion. And yet, we find so many reasons for segregation: religion, ethnicity, social status, language, even the school one attended is good enough for us to isolate from the rest. Division is in our blood.
Every religion, they say, shows the path to peace. But every religion is a creation of man. Law, they say, seeks for social order. But every law is a creation of man. Man is flawed. A flawed being can only produce thoughts as flawed as itself. Expecting anything better out of this being is fallacy. The happily coexisting society we’ve been promised is by far a delusion. The global village made possible by technology is but a figment of the imagination. The castes we’re born unto, the religions we’re told to follow, the languages we have to speak are held superior every time. For centuries we’ve been fed vicious lies, but none as vicious as the lie that circumstances of one’s birth makes one superior or inferior to another. That lie is precious to us than any other worldly thing imaginable.
Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi spoke of his anger recently — the anger in which he found his God. To me, there is much hope and beauty in such a religion than in one that would promise you Heaven or Nirvana.
We all have our rituals, our cultures that we fight to protect and our histories we blindly believe in. What we don’t have is the empathy to realise that another man inherits the same burden.
Only when we’re ready to believe that another’s faith, skin colour and language is good as ours will we build this borderless village we’re dreaming of.
Is such a union possible, I do not know. I honestly can’t tell. The human mind is as unpredictable as the state of a electron, but what is known for certain is that every man is willing to become an island unto himself for pure selfish gain.
In such times one can only be as concerned as Kurt Cobain.
“Oh well, whatever, never mind.”
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