Everywhere is war

I have been having a bout of angst, despair maybe; I’m not sure how to describe the wave of bleakness that has been washing over me. An optimist at heart, I am usually able to ferret out things that bring even a glimmer of hope under trying circumstances. I know that feeling will return.

Experience has taught me that. In my personal space, things have taken an unexpected turn in a positive way. It would be churlish for me to complain because I can truly say that I have arrived at a place where it is not difficult for me to feel contentment.



What has caused my spirits to plummet is the level of violence and the unjustifiable pain trampling the world. The day before I am writing this, I found myself in tears as I watched news channels reporting on the ­ongoing horror in Gaza, and the devastation in the Ukraine. They form the headlines daily.

The numbers of dead and wounded are staggering. In Sudan, a humanitarian crisis ­exists after two years of internal fighting. The country is facing a famine; with reports that 24.

6 million people are struggling for food. Massacres, gang rapes, sexual slavery, ethnic cleansing, public executions; it is too much for the mind to assimilate, even from such a distance. Even a cursory look at global news reveals how widespread is the violence that stalks the planet.

This barbarity, this calculated stream of destructiveness, this is what we humans have achieved? I’ve been generally avoiding looking at the coverage, and I suppose when you avert your eyes and then look again, it really hits you. As I looked at the little body bags zipping up the cancelled lives of children, while mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters shed loud and profuse tears, I couldn’t help but wonder: what will their lives be like from now? So many people have died. Each one had been connected to other living souls.

Is the planet to be populated by scarred survivors? How many have been physically mutilated, physically displaced, mentally shattered, because of the instructions of old men? You see the faces of children, distorted by anguish as they behold the battered and broken bodies around them. You see the blank expressions on those whose emaciated bodies ­attract only flies. You see little frames struggling to carry weights that would crush adults.

You see fear and confusion casting out any semblance of the carefree image one would associate with childhood. How can you not wonder what this paltry planet holds for them? I have been stricken by visions of how their traumas will unleash themselves on their lives. We have sown the seeds of a generation of souls so blistered and burned by unspeakably brutal experiences that it is impossible to imagine them growing up without rancour at the very least.

It has made me angry and sad and scared for the future of this earth we call home. It is especially maddening when you think that this wreckage has been wrought by the actions of a handful of vainglorious fools who preen in their opulent spaces while sending out foolish lackeys to lay waste to a world to which they have no right of ­dominion. What do these so-called soldiers believe they are doing? I’ve tried to imagine how they must see themselves; what role they think they are playing.

Why they feel enough fealty to their masters to perpetrate such nasty acts on other humans. I can only come back to the idea that humankind has always been ­capable of the worst atrocities of any species. Other creatures hunt and kill in order to survive; not for sport.

I suppose there is also the element of marking and protecting territory. But still, humans have largely been driven by greed. They have to own and consume everything in sight.

Look at the pulsating avarice thrumming away behind the Donald Trump administration’s obscene attempts to bring any opposing principle to its knees. Fortunately, there are points in human history when the behaviour of despots goes too far and the tipping begins. In my own lurching towards the idea that there is something redemptive in human behaviour, I hope that there will be an uprising, many uprisings, all over the planet that will enable us to find some measure of redemption for ourselves as a species.

I mean, in many ways we have to accept some responsibility for the situation we find ourselves in today. We have failed to act too often. We have been silent too often.

In our inertia, we have allowed corrupt and evil forces to occupy significant spaces in our lives. We are here on the brink of a general election that has certainly whipped up a kind of frenzy on the local landscape. So much of the campaigning has remained stuck in past modes.

Music trucks are vile intrusions at every level. At the various meetings, the trend is to attack individuals, rather than issues. I’ve now listened to many claims and counter-claims, and the wagon-loads of promises.

I don’t know if it is the ­editor in me, but I have been struck by the natty use of language. Insinuations are embedded, promises seem to offer things that they aren’t really offering. It would be prudent to read the fine print.

After all, we will have to live with the choices we are making now. —Vaneisa Baksh is an editor, writer and cricket historian. E-mail: vaneisabaksh@gmail.

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