First, I am going to ask you some really dumb questions,
and in answering them myself, you shall figure they are not as dumb as you might
have thought them out to be. To give you a slight preview, considering the
world these days is rather ignorant of anything beyond their noses, the condition
for minorities is fragile in our country, like anywhere else. We are inconvenienced
at nearly every stage of our daily lives, primarily, for the heinous acts
committed by some who are severely misinformed. The ideology to keep alive, and
preserve, the doctrines supported by the majority community has been such a
great influencer to the people in general, that no matter how warm-blooded, or
fiercely courageous we are, it is sometimes scary when you are on the road alone,
and you suddenly happen to see a set of people; you simply don’t want to meet
eyes with them for the dread that your name could possibly evoke any degree of
an unpredictable reaction in them. Kindly do not interpret this wrongly. Such
behaviour does not demoralise me. It troubles me somewhere, yes, but by a
hair’s breath, considering that common sense enlightens me that every majority
is also a minority somewhere, and what they do to me, someone will do to them. People
of learning are familiar of this sequence of life, and it is those who are
alien to such a conviction that actually behave in an unbecoming way. And it
was for those reasons that I had kept most consciously away from following the
American election, or reading up in detail on the candidates standing for the
run for the President of America, although I was perfectly aware that none of
them were puritans, just as nobody who ever enters politics is.
Ever since the announcement of Mr Trump being President
elect was splashed across the media, I notice how nearly everyone is up in
arms, concerned chiefly about the unity of humans, the threat to the diversity
of mankind, and the way things may turn out in America, that could consequently
modify the rest of the world. So on to my really dumb questions – is he any
less wicked than the others we have everywhere? Are his strategies to divide
and deport, something we aren’t accustomed to seeing around us already? So what
if he is tactless, doesn’t he hold the courage to be what he is, and that is
wrong on what counts really? The answer to majority of those queries can be
found in the affirmative, and so I ask, what is the actual concern? It was you,
the right supporters, who voted him in, and it was you, the left, who stood on
weak grounds. If you had been proactive, participated in dialogue, you would
not be taking to the streets with – Not My President, today. You could have
done something when you had the means to do something, but did you? It is easy
to wail, but the power of change, of damage control, was in each one of your
hands back then, don’t you forget that. Here is a little lesson. When we are amicably
co-existing with hatred and the distrust in our own land of birth. When we are learning
and unlearning how to manoeuvre verbal and emotional disgrace. When we are made
to feel petty for no fault of ours, what is so hard for Americans to learn to
live with an element of restlessness that they are quite responsible to have
been the cause of creating over the world? Why shouldn’t we celebrate someone
to have put in an appearance to give the people a taste of their own medicine? Lo
and behold, in a most delightful way, that day has finally arrived.
Finished with the façade of boldness, which in this
instance is quite a manifestation of strength than fear; let us get down to
business. When I explored into what he proposes to do in his first hundred days
at the office, I was not as perplexed, or worried, as the world is making him (a
monster) out to be. Granted, he has some chinks in his armour, but at the
outset, he is a brash bloke who is breathing the ‘protectionist’ approach to
save the American from what he considers any further doom, and there is nothing
wrong with that. Nobody is an authority on such matters; it is, at the end, a
matter of perspective. He believes in what he is doing, and he is doing what he
likes to do, and since you believed in his agenda you brought him there, so you
as well fall in line with what he has to do for you and your safety.
Barak Obama, when elected as the President, had inherited
a whole lot of chained wreckage buried deep within the sea. A handful he
untangled to keep his image pristine, and for a man restrained by those
unavoidable shackles, he was unable to do much. In spite of those hindrances he
waged his wars, and was instrumental in propagating factions that the world is
crying foul about. Morally, he was a gentleman on whose cloak one could not find
a stain, but politics isn’t about stainless morality now is it?
Frank Bruni of the New York Times stated, “After all the
lies he told, all the fantasy he indulged in, all the hate he spewed and all
the divisions he sharpened, he was rewarded with the highest office in the
land.” Ask any Indian, and he or she will convey most crisply how we are
accustomed to facing uncertainty. How we have mastered the knack of uncovering some
semblance of peace in chaos. But India is not so very important that what
happens on her soil could affect the planet as such. Similarly, what happens in
America might not affect us so as to cause an earthquake in our lives. We might
feel some cracks and ripples, but we will not find our lives toppled or
shattered. Be forewarned, that I am, once again, speaking purely based on reviewing
the fragments from what people are posting on various channels of communication.
Some seem smacked with depression, and some are outraged at what Mr Trump
thinks and plans to do. I would like to tell such people that the antidote lies
in sitting down and taking a deep breath. Don’t we have enough in our own
backyards to deal with than neglect our sleep over America? If and when his overbearingness,
or his devious policies reach our shores, I reckon we can then engage with them
accordingly. For now one must remember that one cannot but deal with spilt milk in another way
than by sponging it from the floor and doing away with the soaked sponge. Time
will pass, and we shall survive, just as we have adapted and survived until now.
Mr Trump is not someone I support, or I oppose. Whether I
agree or disagree too doesn’t matter. Quite frankly, I have no personal opinion
on him. Additionally, he makes no difference to me, as he does not reign over
my country. However, as things stand, I discern that everybody appears emotionally
charged, but once the hoopla dies down, it will be back to business, just as it
has been the case since eons – politics is pure business. Only this time, the
American people have chosen just the candidate without any prior political or
military experience – a businessman in the truest sense of one’s occupation,
and they must have chosen him for the motives they know best.
The backlash, I gather, is already underway. A Chinese young
man was visiting a liquor store to buy himself some cigarettes. A group of
white guys asked him if he spoke English. When he smiled at them kindly and
ignored them, they followed him to the nearest 7-11 and said that ‘Chinks’
should get out of the country while they still can, because the ‘pure American
is finally going to come back’ and chase them out if they aren’t gone by then. The
Chinese young man then went on to narrate how the humane clerk at 7-11 asked
the bunch of White men to leave. Instead of leaving, the White men burst into
laughter and called the clerk ‘Bin-Laden’ and threatened him that they would
come back with more ‘pure White people’ and burn him on a cross. The Chinese
young man, who was terrified and also afraid, asked them to get the fuck out,
and the men go – “Oh, wow, he speaks English!” Follow him to his car and yell
again, ‘White Power’ before him as he sits inside and drives away. If that was
not hurtful enough, another person recounted an incident when her friend told
her that she was at the parking area of a grocery store on the 9th of November.
A guy ran up to her and grabbed her by her crotch and said, “How do you like
that you liberal bitch!” The lady speculates this slur was caused since she had
a prominently visible Bernie sticker on her car.
I am left speechless upon learning of such incidents. Even
if one were to pass them off as a knee-jerk reactions, people, some of those
people, feel emboldened to make a public display of their core values, simply
that those are definitely not the core values we share universally as humans. What
such people do not comprehend is that if one tries to single out one particular
community and throttle them, it is of no use, because it is not that only that
community is suppressed. The currents are felt far and wide, and by one and all.
The potency of hatred consumes everything amid its path. But wasn’t this
immanent? We, the people, had deserved to
be treated like this for being indifferent and uncaring, as we have elected the people currently in
the chair, and they, the exiled office bearers, deserved what they got for
being haughty and stupid. If wisdom had prevailed over the ones who had any
left of it, matters would not have escalated and reached this hopeless juncture
the world over. I was reading how Italy is now going the fascist way. France is
certain about choosing a right wing forerunner. Germany is in distress. Britain
has gone back in time. People, I observe, are essentially fed up of the elites,
and when such a feeling engulfs populations, there is bound to be disorder. Not
that this disquiet was not evident, the establishments were too
blinded, and supremely overconfident to take cognisance when things were still
mendable. Anger. Blame. Post-analysis. It
doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything. What’s done is done. Whatever has
to be will be. However, what matters is to conceive a manner in how to save
humanity that is utterly and terribly at stake in the hands of the Lucifer.
There. Here. Everywhere.
This dismal state of affairs prods me to ask some artless questions: have we, as a race, forgotten the capacity and capability
of reasoning? Are we so dead to sensitivity that we have abandoned the flicker
of analysis from our mental structure? Whatever has happened to humanity? In
one breath we claim to be these human beings supporting groups that are
vehemently campaigning in eradicating certain creeds, and in the same breath we
seem to be struck with a never seen open uproar of preserving one’s affection
towards basic human affection and dignity. When I was expressing my anguish with
a dear friend and author Rakhshanda Jalil, she was quick to articulate her
thoughts on the general trend of the world. “My dear,” she said, “it is the
time of zawal, an Urdu word roughly meaning decline and decay. It is a very
Islamic theology concept insofar as it talks about disintegration, that holds
the promise of renewal.” How true those words ring, don’t they? Though we
can only hope we manage to come away slightly less unscathed as we can from the
grime of life, considering that is how human nature is: you loathe something
when it is new, then in time you will begin to find it oddly accepting, and at
the end, it becomes a part of your life, until the cycle repeats.
I leave you with words penned by a dear friend Ethan Rains
from America. He is an excellent artist, a prolific writer, a popular actor and
a great filmmaker.
Let’s make an
extra effort in practicing human decency, treating each other with love and
respect, and opening our hearts. We need it now more than ever and it starts
with you and me. I am saddened, but weirdly not surprised. Okay…SOME of me is
surprised.
We live in a
country that grants us many wonderful privileges and at times we have to go so
far in the opposite direction to fully awake from a long sleep.
I worked a
private event last night and had a conversation with a guy in his early
twenties who told me that two guys insulted a friend of his from the LGBT
community with red Trump hats at a grocery store. They called him a faggot,
laughed about it as if it was okay to exercise some super power that they now
so freely had permission to abuse. This is just the tip of the iceberg. And
it’s not okay.
Having our
differences and being able to exercise our freedom to vote on two separate candidates
is okay. It’s our right. But once we treat each other poorly because of the
influence of the powers that be, whether we are pro Hillary or pro Trump,
immediately reduces our power as the people.
If you listen to
Trump’s acceptance speech, his rhetoric has already changed. Understand that
behind the curtain there is a lot more happening; at the cost of virtue and the
profit of popularity a game is played and played to a major part of a country.
Getting caught in the spectacle takes away our voice.
It doesn’t matter
who voted for whom – I implore you to be cognisant and respectful. Practice
your core values as human beings.
Peace and
blessings. Love and light. Respect. Power to the people!
Ethan Rains
Wednesday at
15.03
After reading those words you feel that not everything is
lost. If hostility is being poured out on one side, we have hope at the other side
of the spectrum. Yes, but from here, it is entirely left to you which one of
those sides you would like to embrace.
