Lights, Camera, Conscience

"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all" - Hamlet

"I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to." - Alice Walker

"Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander." - Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC


Besides taking a trip to the doctor, and coming face-to-face with the red-hot scorches of the outside world, and grappling with some very hard personal decisions, and succumbing to an endless parade behind my daughter because she vowed to never keep still, and praying that the headache that she was giving me was just a phase, and wondering why life was so hard, and wondering why my life was so hard, and realizing how problematic it was for me to say that my life was so hard....I happened upon my own personal meditation about conscience and fear...

When i thought about the responsibilities that i had as a citizen of the world, and the fact that sitting on my couch reading a book written by an highly acclaimed author didn't exactly placed me in a position to do anything, call me crazy, but it made me think long and hard about my own complacency in allowing families living in cardboard boxes, children going hungry, children not having access to education and so on, it made me think long and hard about my own complacency in allowing these things to happen because i did nothing.

I also thought about my own political views which surprised me because i didn't know that i had any. When i thought about all the people who went up against powerful authorities and risked their lives in the name of revolution and change, even while knowing that their own lives were at risk, it made me feel more like a coward than i had ever felt. As i sat on my couch, i thought about this. And i realized that i had never felt more powerless in my entire life; and like all people with a conscience, i thought: "what can i do?", only to hear my own voice echo my own incapability. I didn't have the weapons, or resources, as they say, that i needed. I came to realise that my only weapons were my words. And nothing hurts more than a willingness to do something, and understanding the pressing need for something to be done, only to find that you could have only written a blog about it and move on. Cold, isn't it? I wondered how my life would have been different had i been so circumscribed by the rations of history (and the lord knows my life had been much circumscribed).

My only solace, and conclusion if you will, was that: knowledge gives us all a conscience, and it is also knowledge, not ignorance, which causes us not to act. A friend once told me that i always tended to put other people's need before my own. Maybe that's my problem, or, maybe, just maybe, i'm just being human.