It Matters. Period.

Long post alert.

I am no “bleeding-hearts” liberal. Neither am I a “ranting” right-winger. I can like one and dislike the other and vice versa, based on situations. I am no die-hard. Because to do so would be to become absolutes and people are rarely just one thing. The one thing we can count on with surety is the gray in them.

Despite being halfway across the world from the troubles in USA, I am still bothered by the way things seem to be playing out there. It doesn’t directly impact me sitting in India but given that a “super-power” of the world still acts colourblind in this day and age, is nothing short of disappointing to say the least and my mind shudders to think of the worst.

As a child in 1992, seeing the live coverage of the L.A riots in the aftermath of the Rodney King incident, I wasn’t impacted much because L.A and New York were faaar apart. We did discuss it in my class and from what I remember, not too many of the kids focused on the color of King’s skin. They did think it was “messed-up” to attack an unarmed man though.

Fast forward a few decades and we now have the BLM movement gaining momentum once again because of 3 unnecessary deaths in very short intervals in 2020. The fact that there had to be a movement stating that Black Lives Matter, is a cause for concern. Why shouldn’t it matter? And to counteract it with another movement called All Lives Matter seems like a farce.

Throughout human history, the times when being humane hasn’t been the default order of the day are during times of abject poverty and hunger; when people killed to stay alive or during the regimes of despots when genocide took place to showcase might or to shut down the dissenters.

But sitting in 2020 with the kind of advances that have happened in science, technology the world over, to have to iterate that there’s a value attached to a human life that goes beyond the color of the skin, is a giant step back. We cannot afford to devolve especially at a time when people ought to be rallying together to stay safe and work at rebuilding.

I look at any kind of police or armed force (the official ones and not the mercenary kinds) as a necessary evil. Our societies are huge and self-regulation isn’t practiced by all. The establishment of “peace keepers” and the judiciary is essentially for that- keeping the peace and for disciplining the malcontents who continue to buck the limits of legal norms and cause disruptions.

I am not naive enough to long for Utopia but a march in the opposite direction goes against everything that I want from the world where my child is growing up.

It boggles the mind that a policeman would choose to subdue a potential suspect by kneeling on his neck. And continue to do so for close to 10 minutes. It also boggles the mind that a country allows for such laxity in owning and handling firearms that anyone who seems to running away is automatically taken to be guilty and can be fired upon. A woman whose car is spotted outside the residence of a suspected drug dealer, can have her home broken into and get fired upon without having a chance to answer questions defending herself.

It would seem that justice, in this day and age, is not blind to color but seems deaf to cries as well.