All lives matter

The rot lies within us and the symptoms tumble out in our daily news – a choke here, a rope there, a mob here and a monstrosity there – all telling us a tale – a tale of lost lives and lost causes and a tale of the history that we have crushed to pulp.

We were the fortunate generation which came into life after the carnage and bloodshed, the generation that was born into a life of equality and nondiscrimination – cocooned from the revolts and revolutions that changed mankind. But what did we do with the silver platter – we ate out of it with unabashed gluttony, we ensured that we never looked into the eyes of the starving soul who peered into the platter and we finally hid that platter away from the eyes of the ‘others’ – it is after all for our ‘selfish consumption’.

The slavery, the misogyny, the partitions, the walls and the apartheid that took lives but hoped to establish a sense of justice and ‘fairness’ to the world just seems like a rather good waste of human lives - we still practice these ‘honourable’ traditions but it is packaged with finesse and powdered with rouge and sometimes masquerade itself as policy and practice. But the disguise doesn’t do its job as the person at the receiving end will feel it all – the injustice, the bias, the untold words and visible signs break hearts, end journeys and choke lives.

We all are party to the pandemic around us – not the physiological one, but the silent and mental one that is floating around the globe – sometimes unchecked, sometimes asymptomatic and sometimes fatal. We are the generation of ‘tolerators’- we tolerate if it doesn’t affect us, we tolerate if it is not a ‘big deal’ and before we know it the insults have turned into slaps, the grope has turned into assault, and the bias turned into murder – will we still tolerate? An answer which time or struggle will tell.