"When
the heart turns cold it causes your soul to freeze
It spreads through your spirit like a ruthless
feeling disease.
When your heart turns cold a baby’s cry means
nothing,
A dead corpse is trivial, death seems like
tranquility."
-Tupac
Shakur (The rose that grew from concrete).
This is the same old story. We are going over it again because there
are things that we know saying once or twice will not suffice. So again I ask
‘does anyone else see the clouding of our humanity?’
We need to stay warm inside, to remain humane. One death
should scare us as much as a hundred. It should stir just as much attention,
just as much outrage. I know how I feel when I see those headlines ‘Five dead
in bomb explosion’. I know the relief. The feeling of ‘thank God they did not
succeed’ But didn't they? In the midst of such chaos it is easy to let our
emotions drown in numbers. To be deceived by the danger in statistics.
We do not need to be activist to know that even as we strive to
be strong; we must not let this strength strangle our conscience. The worst
antidote to a bad situation is complacence. Acceptance. the ‘it is a normal
thing’ syndrome, because it isn't. It isn't normal to go out and have this creeping
fear in your mind that you might be at the wrong place at the wrong time and go
as an index into eternity. It isn't normal to travel the highway in constant
fear of herds men now turned high way robbers. It isn't normal to have to say
thank God two people died instead of hundreds. It shouldn't be normal to feel
this kind of gratitude in the face of uncertainty, because the next time luck
may not be so kind and that just one person in the next headline may be us.
When we are grateful we cannot act, we cannot be moved to demand what needs to
be done gets done. That gratitude we know so well when we hear children scream
‘up NEPA’ for the light they should never have to lack. When we are blinded
by a false sense of gratitude we will never feel the ice grow and our hearts turn cold.
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