cowards or fools?

stream of consciousness on (non)violence

you mistake your squeamishness at violence for moral clarity.

your empathy extends only one chess move ahead.

when met with images of people violently resisting kidnappers, modern-day slave-catchers and other state-sanctioned brutalists—all you see is the simplistic, fairytale villainy of ‘violence is bad’.

then you log off, turn on star wars and cheer for luke, leia, han and cassian andor killing stormtroopers. yes. sometimes the good guys murder the bad. i suppose it is much easier to stomach such slaughters when a laser-bolt hits a tin suit and the bad guy tumbles down cartoonishly. the pillows of narrative gently cushion the reality and gore and loss for you. that guy with the plasma-heated hole in his breastplate is conceptually dead.

you have not reckoned with the violence that you enjoy.

if you had your way, or rather, if your way came to pass—we would all die noble, unremarkable deaths. you would applaud at how morally incorruptible we all as we refuse to fight back; batons showering our flesh, tear gas scorching our eyes, bullets ricocheting through our extremities, ropes burning the skin of our necks.

we would we wither in jail cells and concentration camps and you would write us letters and celebrate our fortitude. you would forget how to call a genocide “a war” and you would ‘see’ one side too many. you would have us wait patiently for heartless governments to bloom a flower of a conscience, even when all that’s visible out the window is a sulking, perpetual winter.

you mount the soapbox preaching about voting, optics, and the winning of hearts and minds. what if all the votes are rigged? all the optics are conspiracy-theoried into blurry obscurity? all the hearts are charred? all the minds are empty?

you wheel out martin luther king jr’s name as if you are not the very stumbling block he wrote about from jail. remember, they jailed him? whenever you say that you believe in nonviolent protest like him—all i hear is that ‘you want me to die without a fuss’. remember, they killed him?

the fbi called martin luther king jr ‘the most dangerous negro in america’. they wiretapped his phone and sent him letters urging him to kill himself. that’s just the shit that’s searchable on wikipedia.

cointelpro were more enthusiastic in snuffing out king than the ku klux klan.

yet, you partake in a delusional optimism about him and the system he fought. king may have had a dream but towards the end of his life he also said that his nonviolent protests “carried the blemishes of (his) inexperience”.

you freeze him in amber at a point where he can be your good, saintly, docile negro and you trundle out the fossil of his most convenient ideologies when you don’t have the stomach or wherewithal to overcome your own cognitive dissonance about the truth—that your country’s legacy is one of victorious bad guys.

can you look at the current state of your nation and say, with a straight face, that king’s inexperienced nonviolence has yielded lasting success? do you believe any of the progress—the “melting pot”, the most billionaires per capita, all the black faces in high places—make up for the fact that a child of south african apartheid did a nazi salute at the presidential inauguration, ran through federal government in a perpetual k-hole, got fired then called the president a paedophile? both sides of the political aisle funding the extermination of indigenous people? tourists getting flung in vans? citizens getting detained? people—who have built their lives in your country with the same amount of documentation as the pilgrims—getting snatched up?

proximity wise, how close do you feel to that sparkling dream of his?

your nation has arrived at all its self-proclaimed greatness—its technological advancement, its wealth, its vast occupation of land, its nuclear arsenal, its imposing global military presence—all through violence.

you have not reckoned with the violence that you are a beneficiary of.

what does it make you, to say that nonviolence is the only acceptable avenue for change? are you a wilful or unwilful hypocrite? are you ignorant of your nation’s violently achieved successes or do you just sweep them under your cognitive rug? do you condemn violent resistance to state-sanctioned violence out of a warped sense of care, duty, concern, self-preservation, love? do you believe that luke, leia, han and the ewoks should’ve marched with placards against the empire?

how do you see yourself as an integer in this complicated, moral equation?

do you even know what you are?