HAS ANY ONE WEPT YET?*

"....the globalisation of indifference..."

FUNCTIONAL HANDS -A MECHANISM FOR OUR BRAINS TO ENCOUNTER LIFE PHOTO: Robert Golden

A few nights ago I sat with some friends.
One was glum, seeming depressed,
a state I don’t often see him in.
He pushed his hand from his forehead through his hair
towards the back of his neck,
looked up and murmured, “I know, I know.
It’s not depression, its overwhelming sadness,
especially for the children, for all the children.”

No one spoke for several minutes.
It was as if a silent, unspoken collective grieving had taken the four of us.

I thought, perhaps I imagined that we presently witness,
if not the blood and sinews of massacred children,
then the day-by-day horrifying statistics
of our species’ innocents being kidnapped, starved, bombed into oblivion
by blinded Russians, Hamas infested Palestinians and right-wing imperialist Israelis.
What part the US and the UK play behind the scenes is a known unknown.

The continual repetition of the horrible news
begins to sound like weather reports on a mild day.
We are reduced to thinking that the repetition is just ‘one of those things’
rather than consequences of a totally unacceptable series of policies
being carried out in our names,
or four our ‘safety’,
or to defend our ‘western values’,
or to redefine our ‘moral superiority’,
or to protect ‘our nation’.**

Somehow, the data becomes as boring as the weather report,
and finally the horror has been normalised.
They, the media editors, the politicians, the policy wonks and the ‘experts’
help to rub our moral wounds and consciousness into callouses.   

I sat amongst my dear friends and my wife/lover/friend/everything
and again thought about how those boys and men could have committed atrocities;
then I remembered reading an article about a book written by Francisco Cantu,
an ex-American border guard on the US-Mexican border.

He wrote about how the Badlands are being turned into what a local scholar called
‘the Nahuatl’ or the liminal zone,
(as if being between consciousness and unconsciousness,
between being awake or asleep)
which the scholar described as ‘a constant state of displacement’.
There, brown skinned families are left to die of thirst or exposure
while trying to reach the US border across the badlands,
If the boarder is reached,
adults are forcibly separated from their children
who are thrown into cages and left alone to sleep on cold cement floors.

When I read that, it struck me that these ongoing inhumanities and wars
and the reporting of them
have shoved us all into a psychic and spiritual Nahuatl.
There, our profound sense of displacement
undermines hope, purpose and understanding of our own and other’s attitudes.
Those cynical manipulations by CEO’s, media owners, and politicians
who wish to make us want to hate,
to provide us an easy target to seek revenge against,
which diverts attention from our economic and political hardships,
which makes us susceptible to the state entering another war and another war…
in which the war profiteers gain huge wealth,
in which our sons and daughters die,
and our immoral and lying representatives maintain power. (think Tony Blair)
Pope Francis recently described this as “the globalization of indifference”.

Remember:
Thatcher having things going bad for her;
“ah, a war” she thought, “with a damned naughty (but weak) enemy will do”,
and now Netanyahu,
“OMG, I will be found guilty of my crimes: what I need is a good war with a damned naughty enemy, that will do.”
And Putin and Bush and and and…

Sitting with my wife and hosts,
the beautiful food,
the grace of our friends and the gift of wine,
searching not only for the meaning of the shared moment
but some decoction of words to hang on the passing storm
to help them and myself in this embarrassment of peace and richness we have
whilst others suffer, partly in our names,
and I recalled again Cantu had written,
“Violence does not grow organically in our deserts or at our borders.
It has arrived there through policy.”   

Sound familiar? 

We, and in particular artists and intellectuals
need to wake up and point our fingers and demand loudly
those monsters who create the hellholes others are forced to live and die within,
are compelled by our voices to effectively change things.

It is time we all demand that kindnesses and not economics
are at the centre of our political decision-making.

---

*HAS ANY ONE OF US WEPT?* the title comes from an article (NYRB 06 02 2019) about a book written by Francisco Cantu

**In Britain the richest 1% own 25% of the nations wealth.

The American Federal Reserve data indicates that as of Q4 2021, the top 1% of households in the United States held 32.3% of the country's wealth, while the bottom 50% held 2.6%, meaning the middle 49% owned 17.7%.

According to Oxfam, the world’s richest 1% own nearly twice as much as the rest of the worlds total population.