The realist in Timothy Nigel Shadap wants to make a difference to a world torn asunder by hatred and insensitivity
LIVING IN modern urban culture, it is easy to forget, sometimes, that there is a world beyond one’s ‘narrow domestic walls’ (to use Rabindranath Tagore’s pithy phrase). I am intensely interested in the world, but the daily circumlocutions of work and home, distances me from the wider reality we inhabit. I know full well that the lives we live perpetuate the illusion that the tiny pocket universe of our daily existence is all there is, and all that matters. We read of school shootings, police brutality, war, oil spills, and the heart clenches for a moment, and for that moment we are lifted out of that illusion. We are helpless before the horrors of the world. What’s the point of expending emotional energy on something we can’t change? It is so much easier to run back into the hidey-holes of our lives, especially if we are privileged enough to be far from the scenes of violence and destruction. Privilege, after all, means we can afford to not think about it.
But I am a realist. And I like to think as one – at least the kind I aspire to be – as a student of the world, immersed in the world. When I am tempted to look away from various external horrors to my own concerns, I remember this — and I remember also what I’ve learned through orbiting the sun for over a half-century: that avoiding or denying painful truths has terrible consequences, personal and otherwise.
This is our world: one hundred and forty one people, mostly children, were killed by Taliban militants at a school in Pakistan on December 16. Their photographs tell a story that will always be incomplete. The account of the massacre is terrifying and utterly heartrending. Words are inadequate.
And this: on December 9, a tanker collision off the coast of Bangladesh released thousands of litres of heavy oil into the pristine waters of the Sundarbans. A World Heritage site, the Sundarbans mangrove forest is home to endangered species, and a million people depend on this coastal ecosystem. Now the state-owned Padma oil company is offering money to villagers to collect the spilled oil. Reports indicate that the cleanup is being done mostly by children from the ages of 10-16 with no protective gear, using their bare hands. More recent reports indicate that children are falling sick.
Consider these two tragedies: the massacre of school children in Pakistan, and the oil spill in Bangladesh. I will not compare them – not just because comparisons are odious, but because they are not always helpful. In one tragedy, children died relatively quickly and horribly. In the other, children (and adults, and sentient wild beings) will mostly suffer slowly, and many will die. What is more useful than comparing these two horrific events is to look beneath the surface and see if and how they may be connected. For this we must be able to look beyond individual events, without at all dismissing the gruesome and terrible details of ‘structures’. What do I mean by ‘structure?’ Consider an example. Let’s say you are an able-bodied person. Let’s also assume you are nice to people, including people in wheelchairs. The truth is that you, the able-bodied person, and the person in the wheelchair, inhabit different worlds. Every building, city plan and transport system is planned and constructed with the able-bodied person as default. You, as the able-bodied person, don’t even have to think about the privilege you have, waltzing up and down the stairways. You could, despite being a person who is nice to the person in the wheelchair, still be part of a system that discriminates. To change things for the disabled requires not only a change in attitude but also a system change, a structural change, which was hard fought and hard won by disabled people (and their allies) and is by no means over — for this, or other kinds of oppression.
The power structure that wields such destruction also prevents us from seeing these patterns and structures of injustice. We are appalled at police brutality here, terrorist acts there, an environmental disaster somewhere else. But our middle-class grief is disjointed, episodic, infused with helplessness, barely punctuating the treadmill rhythm of our modern-urban existence. An individualistic worldview In which we are constantly distracted by ‘entertainment’ and the ‘pursuit of happiness’ not only prevents us from seeing systems of oppression but also prevents us from imagining alternative systems, because we can only see things in separate, atomistic, individual terms.
I must make clear here that I am not saying individuals who commit heinous acts should not be held responsible for them. Perpetrators of crimes must be brought to justice, fair trials and all. But we can’t pretend the problem is solved because the bin Laden-du-jour has been captured. There will be another one by and by. Why are they springing up in such numbers? To understand the ways of the world we have to think in terms of systems as much as individual players and forces. Thus by merely scratching at the surface, as I have done, we discover something simultaneously interesting and terrible – connect the dots between a terrorist act and an oil spill in two different parts of the world, and the lines lead right back to us. This is not new or surprising, but it bears repeating. We are complicit in the sins of the world.
I am not saying we are guilty, per se, but we do benefit from the same structure of power and destruction, that world-eating monster that begets such horrors. In any case guilt is not a very useful emotion. But can we at least feel responsible? Responsibility – informed by knowledge, separate from condescension or charity, may well be something else.
It is not enough to feel the pain of the world, or even to write about it. But it is a beginning. Perhaps words, if they are the right words, can lead us back to ourselves. The poet Sahir reminds us that “in a world of hatred we must build settlements of love.” The imagination proves to be a great instrument – it builds, it tears down, it exposes, it creates. It invites us to look at the world differently, to see things we didn’t see before, to recognize that we are never separate from it. It compels us to work harder to understand. Through story we make connections across space and time, from here to there, from me to you, diminishing, for a few moments, the illusion that we are strangers.