The "L" of Life

“It will come as no surprise that health is the most talked about topic on the internet. But what about the health of the planet? Or our species as a whole? When you take a look at our world today, do you ever get that feeling that sometimes you just want to cry? I have to confess to being a bit weak in the tear ducts, anything can set me off. And sometimes a good cry can be cathartic. I do wonder, though, when that moment will come finally where we realise there is more to take out of life than being taken out of it. And when those enlightened future generations look back on our times, what will they say about these specific years where everything just seemed to be on the brink?”
— Mickie Kent

I have been watching with horror after the (most) recent case of racial profiling in America ended in the death of another African-American teen. I asked myself if this would be the one-too-many fatality to push people over the edge. Even one life is too many, but as the body count piles up in similar tragedies across the United States, it's going to get harder for even the most conservative American to stomach. At least, one would hope.

An independent post-mortem examination has determined that the young boy was shot at least six times, including twice in the head. Witnesses said the unarmed teenager's hands were above his head when he was repeatedly shot by an officer in Ferguson, Missouri on the 9th of August. For strangers like myself here in England, peering into the US from a microscopic media lens and reading stuff like that, it feels like people of colour are easy targets for the police and public majority alike, to literally take pot shots at. The resulting protests and clashes are unsurprising, but the official overreaction to them has been creepily surreal.

Ferguson officer not charged in teen shooting.

I had just written in a previous post that authoritarianism was spreading across our world in mind as well as spirit, but had not envisaged that there would come a time when I would see Amnesty International dispatching organisers to US soil for the first time in its history. Let that sink in. Not Ukraine. Not Gaza. ST LOUIS. Where the police have military-style battle gear and use it on their citizens, and a state of emergency was declared alongside the imposition of a curfew and the deployment of the National Guard TWICE. Tear gas has been fired, and American and foreign journalists have been arrested and injured in the fall out.

Not only does this happen in America: we've been reading of such riots all across the world - of how dictators have quelled dissent and silenced protestors with tactics like curfews and tear gas. Just this Wednesday violent clashes between authorities and residents of an Ebola-stricken neighbourhood erupted in the Liberian city of Monrovia, as the death toll from the disease continued to climb. But was it REALLY only a matter of time that we would be reading about such violence against demonstrators in the land of the brave and the free?

I know the recent killing has touched a chord with many in the African-American community and beyond, which goes further than the shooting itself. Race isn't really the issue. Division is the issue. Insensitivity is the issue. Seeing other human beings as animals is the issue. Race is just a label we stitch onto its particular fabric. Proving the point aptly, one white American citizen, who came out in defence of the police likened those demonstrating over the death of an unarmed black boy by police to dogs. "It's as simple as training your dog. If you don't tell them stop biting, guess what, he's going to continue to bite," he opined, speaking on behalf of "white" America.

However, when we reduce human beings into animal analogies we not only offend ourselves, but the animals we use as examples for our violence and insensitivity. They at least have an excuse. When we react on basic emotion rather than thoughtful emotion we become just as culpable. We are quick to apportion blame, and refuse to ask why people react the way they do. We act on reflex rather than in thought, and liken people to animals, when with such reactions, it's we who are the most befitting to our animal analogies.

Of course America is a huge place. We cannot brush the tar that sticks to the streets of one city across a whole nation, but I think that it does reveal the dark shadows of ghosts past that continue to haunt the continent. On the subject, correspondent Charles Laurence of theweek.co.uk described the recent police killing and the resulting riots as "a story of black poverty and white supremacy".

If the increasing “militarisation” and excessive force of the police had been the spark in the tinder box – as dissenting voices had been warning for months while police binged on armoured vehicles, machine guns and sniper rifles left as surplus from the “war on terror” – there is a dreadful irony in that it now takes the actual military to restore order.

Powerful irony indeed: if we become bedfellows with violence, then our lives become its products. Another correspondent, Nyle Fort writing for The Guardian believes that white supremacy is the real culprit in Ferguson, too, and the excuses being used are the evidence of it. "To be black is to be a victim - and then to get blamed for it. To focus on the people's resistance more than police repression devalues black life", Fort says.

Every type of action and opposing reaction is indeed a chain. Just recently, we have seen its links forged within the ongoing tensions between Ukraine and Russia, as well as between Israel and Hamas. Ukraine accuses pro-Russia separatists of killing dozens of civilians in an attack on a convoy fleeing a besieged rebel-held city, while ceasefire upon ceasefire is broken between Israel and the small pocket of terrorists who refuse to stop attacking a country it can't possibly hurt. But violence, anger, revenge, punishment - these are all addictive cycles. We watch the world at large, and we react like children emulating their parents. And round and round we go down the decades.

You can paint it anyway you like, but ever since those with power decided to pursue policies of violence, we have been breastfeeding those more vulnerable than us on our violent attributes. It's only natural they will grow up and attack us back, because they believe it's the only language that gets results. Such desperate self-preservation will, with yet more irony, eventually lead to our extinction. It will most certainly lead to the death of what makes us human, if we have made violence the victor.

One reader, an attorney from America emailed in to give her account and feelings about the terrible image the Ferguson riots have painted about America. Her letter became even more poignant when she informed me that she had lost her brother in a similar shooting in New York City just seven weeks ago. He had been arguing with his white girlfriend, when the police mistakenly thought a verbal assault was in progress. The couple had been arguing over their wedding list, and were to have been married the following month. His sister had this to say about the killing of the black teen in Missouri:

I'm an American and proud to be one. But I fear for the life of my children when I live in such a trigger-happy nation. It's a horror story. It just goes on without stop. It's relentless, Mickie. I can't tell you how disparate we've become here.

I mean, even if you are shooting an armed person, why would you shoot them six times? What is it inside a person that would just want to destroy another human being that way? Watching the video footage where the white policeman casually walks away after shooting the black teenager six times is worse than chilling, I felt as though I was watching humanity die.

Once the protests began, and I saw the banners that read "Stop Killing Us" it resonated with me deeply. That message spoke not only to the incident that sparked the clashes, but I felt it spoke to the world as a whole. To that majority of us, the billions of us mortified how such a thing could happen in America, it was a plea to violence to stop killing our humanity. One we all share."

Unless we realise that this is a world we all live in, and that we shall exit it one way or another, then change will not come. We'll continue to shun and hate people we don't know and have never met over imagined differences, we'll continue to judge strangers over the stupidest reasons, and think that only our own feelings matter most. We shall remain insensitive to others, and even worse, become insensitive to what we label as "certain types of people". Naturally, no one in their right mind would condone disgruntled minorities using terrorism tactics - violence is not the way to get your message across. However noble the message, once you smear it with blood it will stink and rot. No hand remains clean. And yet we condone violence against those different than us (we've even named national holidays after nation-forming genocides), because it means we don't have to accept responsibility. Even when, clearly, we share in the blame.

For instance, we must accept responsibility for the political machinations of the West since the 1950s, and even further back during the British Empire, which culminated in the devastating events of 9/11, and our calamitous violent response to spawn the violent manifestations of Islam we see at work today in certain parts of the world. Robert Fox writing for theweek.co.uk questions why the lightning campaign, which has seen Islamist militants seize a huge chunk of Syria and Iraq and declare its own Islamic state, was not anticipated by analysts in Britain and the United States - blaming it on George W. Bush's disastrous response to 9/11.

The case against Blair and Bush’s hasty intervention strategy in Iraq is that they never thought through the strategic consequences in going to tackle a non-existent threat - the phantom weapons of mass destruction - and of turfing out a dictator with no idea what to put in his place.

These errors were compounded by the wilful dismantling of the professional core of the Iraqi army and the Baathist civil administration, including those who ran Iraq's hospitals and schools. These two institutions were the only things that stood a chance of holding the country together.

Undoubtedly, when jihadist militant groups gleefully share their kills over social networks, and mention the word "revenge" there's a reason for it. It's historical revenge, keenly felt by a lunatic fringe group splintered from a moderate minority who have felt the pinch of being different, having for decades paid the penalties we have violently dished out because of a violent few. These young misguided people, drawn to such juggernaut jihads, have been fostered by years of hate and injustice - seeing their parents, families and communities singled out as outcasts over the murderous actions of a few. We have made them feel as though they don't matter, and they obviously want to create a society where they do (or destroy the one that doesn't to them). It's an abhorrent society that they wish to create, make no mistake, but we can't ignore the fact that when they felt stuck in a corner they must have asked themselves, "What would America or the West do in this situation?" Then they would have looked back at 9/11 to get their answer: To attack, to hunt, to go after their enemies "dead or alive".

Consequently, by setting a bad example we have left behind a terrible legacy of violence in the wake of 9/11. We are being punished with what we taught by example - with our knee-jerk reactions of revenge. What we have put out into the wider world has come back to land on our doorsteps. And when it comes to civil rights, rarely have we practised what we preach when it comes to anyone but our own citizens, and that it seems - as America shows - we only do if you're the right colour of person. Similarly, with Israel and Hamas. Whatever arguably justifiable reasons we have to set our Goliath-killing machines upon masses of protesting civilians, when there are internationally sanctified schools being bombed and hundreds of children dying - these are means that cannot justify the ends. And if we choose to blindfold ourselves with cultural or racial bias so as TO justify them, then we lose our humanity in the process.

Channel 4 news broadcaster Jon Snow recounts the scene in Gaza's al-Shifa hospital, where doctors struggle to treat adults and children wounded by Israeli attacks (26 July 2014/YouTube)

Kick-starting a process of violence is a downhill, slippery slide. Especially when the civilian casualties begin to disproportionately pile up on one side and not the other. Or do Palestinian children have to be the "right sort" to get acknowledged? Israel keeps putting out the "human shield" theory - which is becoming as offensive as the "blood libel" slander aimed at Jews - to excuse the hundreds of children slaughtered, but even if these children, women and entire families are willing to get bombed, should we not ask why? It's inconceivable to us in the West why people would waste their lives in such a way: What their lives must be like, what terrible conditions they must endure to make them feel they have no other choice but to add their own life to the body count to give voice to their plight? And we in the West, tongue-tied by our historical genocidal shame over our treatment of the Jewish people say nothing. Or is it more than that?

Is it that we believe these people aren't human? That they are somehow dumb, feral creatures whose lives are not worth the same as ours? Or do we believe that once we eliminate all Muslims (as if that were possible), then world peace will suddenly come to our streets? It's not us, it must be them, we believe. We're civilised, they are the barbarians. But when there is not one single Muslim left on our streets then we'll start on the Jews (no longer united by a "common enemy"), because their religious practices are almost identical to the Muslims. And when they are gone, who shall we start on next?

Naturally, we'll just start on each other. The fact is we are becoming as bad as the people we think we're so against, and in their absence what else will addicts of violence do, but start on each other? Until there is no one left to fight. Because that's what we do. We war over everything. Over culture. Over who owns what food. Over where we should live. Postcode lotteries where the rich push out the poor. This divide has even leaked over into the topic of wellness. Your income and environment can make a big difference to the weight loss methods you choose and their success rates, according to new research. So, are you a victim of the great dieting class divide? And if you're not lucky enough to afford to live in a clean air environment outside of the urban cities, and afford clean food, then what do you do?

Going back to America, Dr Martin Luther King Jr said in 1968: "A riot is the language of the unheard". Today, nearly 50 years later, it's not only black America that demands to be heard AND heeded - by any means necessary - it's rebel groups all across the world. In defiance of the fact that America may continue to alienate these rebels abroad by calling them terrorists, or alienate their own citizens by blaming them for the recent riots, and despite the fact that Israeli air strikes will continue and successfully kill senior Hamas military commanders, violence does not end violence, it only begets it.

Did a violent response to the protests in Ferguson make things better? Of course not. The police killing of a SECOND black man in the St Louis-area has threatened to further enflame tensions rather than pacify the fears of the demonstrators. Furthermore, in the cause of our righteous self-defence, we tend to forget just what it is we are really defending when the fighting goes on too long. Have we once, since getting caught up in this blood lust, checked ourselves and our motives to see if what we are so zealous over defending even exists any more? The freedoms and dignity afforded to life we fight so hard to protect, do they even exist, even if just for "a chosen few"? When our anti-extremist laws become as extreme as the extremists themselves, then who has "won"?

It's the same elsewhere, across the world. Israel has done more harm to its public image than good, further bloodied with child butchery, rather than present itself as the dignified bastion of democracy it really is, defending itself against terrorists who would destroy them. Israel may indeed view itself as the latter, but in the eyes of many, including some of their allies, the disproportionate amount of deaths of so many civilians and children is too much to stomach. To make matters worse, there are very few Jewish moderates in Israel protesting against their government's actions. In their silence they are condoning violence as a proper resort, like those in America who came out in defence of the police, like those moderate Muslims who refuse to condemn those using their peaceful religion as a weapon. But it only means they have given an open invitation for that self-same violence to make an appearance on their streets some time down the line.

A demonstrator throws back a tear gas container during riots over death of teen in Ferguson/Photo by Robert Cohen

Endorsement of violence means the horror stories will just keep on coming. Relentlessly. And those of us - the majority of billions - will continue to allow the few to hijack the future of the many. Because that is what's happening. We mustn't forget that these horrors spun around us are not our stories, but we have allowed them to be written as such. Is every policeman in America a white supremacist? Of course not. The majority of Americans are good, decent, honest and loving people, as is their police force. As are Israelis. And Muslims, of any sect, from any region.

Yet we tend to forget that fact, even the moderates amongst us who sit back watching ever horrified as today's tales of upheaval, murder and mayhem play out in front of eyes. On this staged drama, peace is analogous to struggling indie artists who're trying to attain a modicum of recognition for songs against an industrious, money-making, massive machine of war that controls the populace. Feeling stuck within this cycle of hatred, because we feel it has become ingrained in too many of us, is soul-destroying. And we are setting up more generations of hatred even as we speak. As women, we may blame male dominance, but even men feel victims today. Chris Goode's controversial one-man play Men in the Cities, while exploring the anxieties facing men in modern Britain, also cuts to the heart of violence and masculinity. In an interview for The Telegraph, he said:

Patriarchy seems to me like a giant self-harm machine. It feels like as a man, or becoming a man, you fear what seems to be an inherent capacity for violence and knowing that that violence is present somewhere in your circuits and if you disavow yourself, than you become the victim of it.

Once you allow violence to take the wheel, it goes on auto-drive and you don't know where you'll end up. But you can be sure that the destination won't benefit anyone - and especially not the driver. Violence sets us up for a fall. Take our Western film industries. We are casualties of Hollywood's violent addictions; it's the only way some of us can express our disillusionment when our reality - or more correctly our perception - doesn't live up to expectations ballooned with movie hype. We begin to see an enemy behind every corner. We go for the gun believing it can solve all our problems, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Unfortunately human nature itself encourages this folly to spread widely; let a critical mass of people begin to believe something, however fictitious, and soon the contagion of popular hallucination has everyone knowing it for a fact. It's the same with the violence we might feel is erupting all around us like Iceland's Bardarbunga volcano, but its ongoing magma movement is only a moment in time. The truth is, whether it seems that way or not, compared to other centuries, the world has never been better. We are more sensitive to misogyny, prejudice and casual racism than we were in times gone by. Few would want to see a return to the world of the seventies and eighties, when groping a woman was seen as standard practice and nobody batted an eyelid if you derided people as wogs or yids. We're more accepting now, more than ever. Other people are allowed to be other people. Your perspective is only yours, and you have no need to force it on others, just as they don't need to force their values on you.

Conservative Republican Ron Paul said that the true antidote to racism is such liberty - but then cheapened it with his own personal libertarian ideology based on a 20th Century creed of selfishness. But for liberty to be an antidote to intolerance, money and wealth should not be its measure. For liberty to work it has to be liberty for all, not left to be dispensed out in the hands of a few. When that happens, our liberties, like capitalism, becomes corrupt and decrepit and brings chaos. We've all been casualties of that, too.

Undeniably we need freedom and space to grow, but in all respect to Paul, money shouldn't be the equalizer of human life - as though you should only be taken seriously when you have wealth. Liberty isn't something you should have to work to get or accumulate. Human dignity isn't something only for those who can afford it. It doesn't have a price tag; it comes attached to the sanctity of life. And not to only one way of life, either. Many conservatives think the minorities in their societies are trying to do to them what they're doing to the minorities - oppress them and make them lesser people. It's what we see happening in Ferguson, today. It's like when you see a man who constantly accuses his wife of cheating, and it turns out he's the one who's been cheating all along.

Now ask the average person what's wrong with government, and you'll hear all about corrupt politicians, corporate lobbyists and shady back-room deals. But, of course, we elected those corrupt politicians, and the more you look at the situation, the more it appears that as people, we are just really bad at democracy. Because we attach a price to it.

That hypocrisy, so pervasive in our political systems today, has also infected us. We excuse our prejudices, our biased actions - however racist they might be, because we can't see what we're doing is not protecting our values, but devaluing our human worth. We do it every time we give more (media) attention to the death of a white person above a person of colour, but the loss of life, whether by beheading or by shooting, is equally horrific despite the colour of that person's skin. I've even had many people try to argue with me that racism is just another form of censorship, and "nonconformists" should have the freedom to be racist if they want to - when it's just an excuse to give vent to the nasty attitudes that lurk in the dark recesses of the mind. They even argue that the origin of the word "racist" comes from a Jewish communist, as though that somehow negates the word's loaded meaning today.

Of course, what's important is the meaning common culture and our modern societies have given to the term racism. Moreover, why on earth would any intelligent person need to belittle, attack or subjugate another as a safety valve over the suffocation of excessive political correctness, or adhere to a stereotypical caricaturisation to make a point about another person? And the point is that we should never generalise a person to what we perceive to be the (negative or positive) traits of a single race or culture. Because what we're doing is dehumanising that person, and a precondition of doing violence to any group of people or nation is to make them less human. Highlighting their differences to us. Setting up walls in our minds before they even exist. While another excuse of the anti-politically correct brigade is the claim that there can be too much sensitivity, swinging the pendulum the other way too much in favour of the minorities. But this defence of reverse racism is defunct because we live in a culture that supports and enforces whiteness as the norm and people of colour as the other. It's like being bigoted against white supremacists, it may sound plausible in theory, but it doesn't work in practice.

Frankly, notwithstanding the reality that we all have biases, I've tried to remove these outmoded mindsets, and the people that promote them, from my life. Two years ago I met a person who outwardly seemed as nice a person as you could want to meet, but the minute I realised he was racist, I politely severed the friendship. The issue was over a white South African friend of his who argued that apartheid never existed, and Nelson Mandela was jailed for being a terrorist who deserved his punishment. And my friend saw nothing wrong with that, and was perfectly comfortable about making racist jokes about it - describing it as irreverent gallows humour or friendly "banter". Both are gay, which proves that being a victim of discrimination doesn't mean you can't discriminate yourself. Likewise Israelis, who were once the victims, have now become the culprits in a vicious cycle of hatred - where what goes around will invariably come back around to you.

Although disgust is not a word I use lightly about how I personally feel about such matters, the incident did serve as an important lesson for me. I thought: I've no right to judge people who think that way - all I can do is make sure MY path is on a different route. We mustn't be lax in ourselves, because if we feel the need to keep highlighting people's differences, or we want to separate people simply because we perceive them to be different than us and thus a threat to our way of life, then we should expect more of the same horror stories we're inflicted with today. That's not the sort of story I want to write. I want to write a different tale in my life. To sing a different song.

Poet Langston Hughes wrote during the 1920s, a period known as the "Harlem Renaissance"
because of the number of emerging black writers.

In my attempt to do that, I forgive those people who are racist, and forgive myself when I find myself discriminating against others, too, but always aim to correct it. As the poet Tagore has pointed out, our passing thoughts are more like approximations, in need of correction, than truth. When we come at it from a divine perspective as an inner witness, it gives us the confidence to see that our imperfections and distracted thoughts do not constitute who we are. We find that our temporary patterns of mind prove not to be the final version of ourselves - that in the end, we are something more than our thoughts but an experience of mind that is awakened when we have the wisdom to understand (as I put it) what the "L" in life stands for.

Deep down we all know the answer to that one. Even the friend I had to let go, if he brought the "L" of life into his own existence, he'd realise that his racist friend does him more harm than good. We are not defined by our associations, but we can be infected by them. We can forget that the "L" in life stands for love. But if we concentrate, strengthen and nurture love over the daily course of our lives, then we will come closer to our true humanity. Love is the healing agent that can awaken an enduring new vision of ourselves, despite all the violence we're subjected to - a violence which will eventually have to tire itself out. In the long run peace is the proverbial slow turtle that wins the race against the speedy hare. Whether the Israelis or the Islamic militants get what they want, they won't truly be happy until they learn to love their neighbour. And if those so hell-bent on a jihad continue in their violent manner, once secluded from the majority of civilisation, they'll start exterminating each other, or finally realise that there is more to life than the taking of it.

So, once we start putting the real "L" into life, rather than making a hell out of it, we'll understand the wisdom that the late astronomer Carl Sagan arrived at. And we won't have to go to his great heights to discover it. I'll let him have the last word, because he has said it as eloquently as I have read anywhere. Whether Jew or gentile, his words are filled with a truth that will resonate with us all, because it does not speak to a single race, colour or creed, but to the human inside of us all.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being that ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi

Putting the "L" into life,