Every Life Matters- 2020, A Year Of Gloom and Doom

My heart is weighing down with one atrocity after the other. The year started with the Australian bush fires and now we’re at George Floyd’s death, a life that didn’t deserve to be taken on the basis of his color. This monstrous story has lit fires to outrage globally. Social media is overflowing with #blacklivesmatter. What is behind the curtains? A genuine concern for change? Or just FOMO of not being a part of the ongoing conversations worldwide? 

How Informed Are We?

Did we speak out for the loss of lives in West Bengal’s worst cyclone in decades? Did we indict the discrimination against migrants walking thousands of miles across India? Most of us have also probably missed the headline of a Dalit man killed for eating in front of upper-caste men. 

It Is Only Fair to Engage in Action After Discussion?

Surmising that the users of the hashtag are indeed prowling for justice, here is my view of what we should be doing instead of Blackout Tuesday on the internet. We should shut down social media for a bit and actually look at what is happening around us. Contemplate the unfairness and shed light to the bottom of it. That way, we can actually indulge in the joy of scraping off any wrongdoing, small or big. 

Helpless anger pervades. So must help and a shift in behaviorism.   

I want to illuminate the matter that black lives do matter but also brown, Dalit, migrant, minority, and human lives. We are much closer to migrant lives around us than to black lives in another country. To advance in real and revolutionize the whole of humanity, we must not only follow a hashtag on social media but also READ AND REFLECT. 

Let's step out of the concavity of social media. Let's step up a gear in the real world. 

Impel Change, One at a Time:

I am supportive of the uproar against the misdeed of what happened to George Floyd. But it is also time to turn our attention to the racism faced by our friends from the Northeast of India who is being called Chinki and Chinese. It is also time that we fight for equal rights for migrant laborers who are on the ground building India brick by brick. It is time to be mindful of the malnourished kids dying in the country. It is time to stand up against abuse of any form. It is time to straighten things out by impelling change in ourselves, in the minds around us, in the country and in the world one increment at a time. 

 

Authored by Pragati K B