What's Going On?

A woman wept on the TV screen. Lamented the fate of her husband, convicted as a terrorist, awaiting death on the hand of the righteous law enforcer. “He’s innocent,” she wailed between her sobs. “He’s my husband.” The picture changed, a man in expensive suit with a boring tie. “It’s decided,” he declared, “Justice must be served.” The anchor woman pop in with a plastic smile, announcing another message of grave importance. Floods, catastrophes, war, human idiocy. They call it news, these tragedies. They believe we need to know.

They told us about this war in distant lands, they move us to do something about it. They call us to act, to go beyond the great sea and fight this war of strangers. Solidarity, brotherhood, justice: their words of wisdom. They forgot one more, though: violence. It’s the core of their actions. Violence; they breathe with it, live with it, can do nothing without it. They can’t help it, this cluster of manhood we call ‘human race’. Violence, it’s their language of ‘truth’.

It’s funny, really, the way they define their values. They’re enraged by the news of strangers died in their faraway lands. They rush out to help, to defend those strangers with whom they never shared earth and waters and blood. Promising God’s heaven to anyone naïve enough to listen (what right do they have, promising something that’s not even theirs to offer?). But when they heard of their own sisters wronged so far away from home, the only word of justice they cried out is silence.

And I thought of a bitter debate I had some time ago, when the same righteous people fought to ban abortion, when they forcefully condemned abortion and calling it evil, calling it murder. Where are they now, as the death penalty hover around demanding it’s toll? Why wouldn’t they call it murder? Why wouldn’t they call it evil?

They believe they’re righteous, these people of values. They blinded their eyes to the double standard upon which they build their values—be it as glaringly obvious as it is. They care not about our own sisters who work as TKW being wronged. They care not of the murders performed by our own so-called law. They care not about the violence of neglect continually done by our own government. They care for nothing but their own values.. they cannot feel nor see the hollow emptiness within those values.

So here I am, weeping for their blindness, weeping for their vast majority, weeping for my helplessness to make a difference.

[Friday, 11 August 2006]