Fafda Files: The Elephant in the Room

People’s lives much like honour or morals have ceased to have meaning. Have we gone mad?  As a human race, have we forsaken civilisation?  

“Seven mass killings in seven days” – blared major headlines this past week in USA, with the latest being the mass slaying of civilian shoppers at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, by a Syrian American, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa. This, while we barely reeled from a hate crime against Asian American masseuses in Atlanta, Georgia, USA (located in the Bible Belt). The perpetrator was twenty-one-year-old Robert Aaron Long, whose devout faith was misogyny dressed up in spiritual language objectifying women: “A woman who has sex before marriage is a rose without petals. Or a cup of water that has been spat in. Or a piece of chewed gum. These teachings fall doubly hard on women of colour, who are already dehumanized by racist attitudes and then sexualized (Washington Post, March 19, 2021).”

Then right on cue came the all too familiar cries of ‘more gun control’ followed by …oh, yes – Thoughts and Prayers! All I could think of was people’s lives much like honour or morals have ceased to have meaning. I happen to speak to the crime wave in USA but that does not absolve the global crimes and atrocities one hears of on a daily basis.

Have we gone mad?  As a human race, have we forsaken civilisation?  I would caution against it as the Bonobos do not want us!  Because they take care of their own and others regardless of religion, caste, creed, or colour. They ask, ‘what price evolution?’ And wander back to their habitats – another man-made prison called ‘the zoo.’

Unsuccessful in dealing with the atrocities committed against black people in America and Africa, our perseverance in establishing superiority in the name of religion, remains undeterred. Or, for that matter let’s give a resounding hand to the mockery we have made of political systems where corruption runs rampant. Surrounded by this chaos amidst the media’s somewhat ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ attitude towards the magnanimity of the damage done, can we as a people afford to ignore the elephant in the room?

Even as we desperately look forward past the one-year anniversary of the pandemic, our complacence focuses on but one aspect – survival. That is back to the jungle law – survival of the fittest. It is a moot point that we have massacred 70% of our jungles, have desecrated the ozone layer and unhappy with the filth we have created, we are straining our sights towards planet Mars with a global vision of creating colonies. I would laugh but for the tears choking me on the inside.

Sadly, we are passing on our contentious ways of living with hardcore prejudices to our children, and we must stop.  A need to take an inventory of who we are and work on our dysfunctional un-progressive attitudes is way past due. In the big scheme of things – do our differences really matter? Our learned behaviors trickled down through ancestry, certain texts and politician mandate for votes contribute towards our puppet existence. We have but two options – break the ties, cut the strings, and revere our existence or continue in this cesspool which we refer to as life.