If I went to bed in June 2008 and woke up in June 2009, I would have found myself in an entirely different world, from such a short time ago. In my own life, and those of my closest friends around me, there was turbulence galore, volcanic eruptions of lingering issues that had been pushed under the carpet; repressed so to speak; the structures of daily life that were carefully imposed over the cracks of the foundation were finally giving away to tectonic shifts underneath. In the world outside, well; besides the election of an enormously intellectual policymaker (who unlike many before him was able to bridge that seemingly impassable divide between thinking AND doing; who married great intellectual heft with extremely strategic politicking); there was a Great Recession, with many people laid off. Ivy leaguers and blue collar workers mourned the passing of the era of the Masters of the Universe, of Detroit. America was no longer Motown, and day after day, companies folded, factories whirred down, newspaper presses became silent. And of course in Sri Lanka, in the past year, another 20,000-30,000 Tamil civilians perished, the LTTE was defeated and a lookalike body of Prabhakaran was paraded in the streets, and the senior Tiger leadership decimated. It seemed as though the death blow to separatist aspirations was finally delivered by the Rajapaksa government, who now enjoyed the widest Sinhala support ever by any Sri Lankan president. 300,000 Tamil refugees still exist in camps, starving and under the watchful, repressive eye of the armed forces. The UN, blinkered and hamstrung as always, in a session intended to reprimand the Sri Lankan government, instead ended up praising it for its 'liberation' operations, and also praising it for not allowing emergency humanitarian aid workers into the camps.
As the song goes: There's a reason to believe we almost got it right.
But the differences contained in almost are vast, infinite, uncontainable. Indeed, the world has changed, and now we must change. Caught in a great dilemma of action, we must choose instead to reflect, mourn, grieve and then begin the arduous, and lengthy task of reimagining democracy, putting our faith back in the power of truth, settling down for the long haul instead of the romanticisim of immediate revolution. Whether we want to or not, we must now imagine ourselves to be part of one country, and force that country to recognize us, and our demands, expressed democratically, expressed through civil resistance and non violence. For those of us who have the luxury of reading and thought, we need to reimagine resistance, and mobilization. I don't know how it is going to happen, and whether I have decided that it is my battle to fight, or to leave. But I am hoping that a door is going to open somewhere soon for me, and that this great burden of indecision will be lifted.
No comments:
Post a Comment