“All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The good god made them all.”
I grew up singing this hymn. I could think of nothing more profound and meaningful to justify the cause ‘All Lives Matter’. The most effortless and straightforward way to teach young minds the lesson in empathy. But the officers responsible for the death of George Floyd or the young villagers who fed the mother elephant the fireworks as a prank have certainly forgotten what they were taught in schools.
In a land where elephant-god ‘Ganesha’ is worshipped and ‘Airavat’, the ten-tusks elephant is the ride of the king of the lords, the brutal killing came as a painful yet unbelievable feat. These are testing times. With pandemic, earthquakes and cyclones hitting us in the face, the last thing we want is to deal with the hatred towards animals.
While we talk about this, let’s not forget the cause ‘All Lives Matter’. It includes migrants, lower castes, blacks, LGBTQ+ or even women in some places. National Commission of Women received 239 complaints between March 23 and April 16 that grew from 123 the previous month. Their lives matter too.
The complaints of caste and religion-based violence has been doing the rounds of media since forever. Incidents of Babri Masjid, Godara riots and most recently the protests against Citizenship Amendment Act are few examples of many that this country has seen in the past seventy years.
The death of George Floyd is just another example in the big pool. #blacklivesmatter has been trending since the incident, the accused officers have been arrested. I watched ‘The Imitation Game’ a few days ago. Alan Turing quotes, “Humans find violence deeply satisfying. This is the reason people like violence.” The most probable and logical reasoning behind violence.
Hatred is as human an emotion as love. It is when the hatred towards someone grows so much so as to make the person walk the way of violence and killings, it is then the person needs to be stopped. Empathy is what most of us have forgotten in our race to success.
Feature Image Credits: Shubha Shrivastava
Good goin Nikk.! 👍