Outrage at sunrise

Credit: author’s photograph taken at 6:20am, 11 May 2024

How can I write about all that matters to me, personally, without the outrage that most of us feel as we look on at this fractured world where so little has changed in 500 years in man’s inhumanity for others, unlike himself.

Was there outrage as the system of slavery was endorsed by governments east and west of the Atlantic for a quarter millennium or when the caste system in India continued as a reminder to all that we are born, unequal, or when apartheid was instituted and upheld in South Africa or the genocide began in Rwanda or indigenous people in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand were robbed of their lands, their children and their lives? The genocide inflicted from one group of people against the other continues. 

The demonstrations, the walk-outs, the sit-ins, resignations and real live stories from the frontlines have not changed the situation for those most vulnerable in the areas of armed conflict; women, older people, people with disabilities and children. Whether it be in, to name a few of the many areas of the world, Ethiopia, the Sudan, Myanmar, the Congo, Haiti or Gaza. The men in suits continue to make pacts with each other, trade in arms and with the lives of human beings on the lands of the ancestors. 

I say men in suits, because what would it take for women who have never, throughout history, initiated the genocide, war, human and land destruction that we see today, to seize power? Is it not a human right for all, that when the sun rises every day, we know that we can also see it set without experiencing the horrors so many of our fellow human beings face every day. A right to a life in peace and with dignity; a home country, food, shelter, education, health and happiness and a right to say – I am. 

At times like these, I look to my mentor, Toni Morrison, for some kind of pathway forward. Her soft-spoken words with the weight of the gavel, reverberate now. 

“Leaders who find war the sole and inevitable solution to disagreement, displacement, aggression, injustice, abasing poverty seem not only helplessly retrograde, but intellectually deficient …” Mouth Full of Blood, Toni Morrison, Penguin 2019. 

How long will our intellectually deficient leaders, lead in this time of outrage?