Numb to tragedy

Across the globe, humans are mowed down in orgies of violence and you wonder if we are in deed in the 21st century, if we have indeed crossed over to the new millennium when beyond the novel 1984, mankind would have reached the zenith of intelligence. Alas, a single death is now tragedy, death of […]

Across the globe, humans are mowed down in orgies of violence and you wonder if we are in deed in the 21st century, if we have indeed crossed over to the new millennium when beyond the novel 1984, mankind would have reached the zenith of intelligence. Alas, a single death is now tragedy, death of hundreds or thousands, a statistic. We live in a world where a human being gets killed for whatever he is – for being man or woman, child or adult, rich or poor, Muslim, Christian, or heathen. Being in the minority in whatever category is now perilous. Man dies!
The death of over hundreds of migrants in boat mishaps in the Mediterranean Sea as they are being trafficked to Europe runs on simultaneously as ISIS videos appear revealing murders of innocents from Egypt and Ethiopia in execution style shootings and beheadings. In Africa, particularly Nigeria, Kenya and Somalia, extremists take communities and exterminate people just as you would, flies and termites. The brutality, so unthinkable, is all so sickening.
Imagine the wave of killings that erupted weeks ago in South Africa. Unsuspecting foreigners, without any inkling, were attacked with cudgels knives and machetes and killed. While others were wounded, property in shops were looted or set ablaze in mindless orgies of violence, orchestrated or applauded by so-called civilised elite. It is crude and a most cruel form of human behaviour, that a fellow human being is killed only because he is in a foreign land and is outnumbered. Who would have thought or even remotely imagined that South Africa, smarting from being freed of the shackles of apartheid would be a hotspot for xenophobia of the brutal type we have witnessed in some of the country’s cities lately?
What is happening to the world?
Tens or hundreds or even thousands are killed in all forms of calamities. A suicide bomber kills scores. An overanxious gunner brings down a commercial aircraft with hundreds of passengers perishing. While one jumbo jet full of passengers in their hundreds, another like it is brought down on a mountaintop by a demented pilot. In one day, 5000 migrants brave dreadful odds to escape to some imagined better life environments. Hundreds are killed as non seaworthy boats capsize. Then natural disasters occur. Take Nepal – almost a whole country is swallowed up in an earthquake. The deadly 7.8-magnitude earthquake that devastates killing 10, 000 people, and yet on this, the death toll is expected to rise as officials dig through the rubble. More than 10,000 are injured. As I write, nearly  5 million people are displaced.
All these are in addition to killings in Nigeria, Kenya, Somalia, and now the latest deadly hotspot Burundi.
A glance at the news headlines makes your stomach churn in angst. Take Syria, where a raging war which erupted since 2012 has destroyed an otherwise thriving civilisation! According to a recent report by the Violations Documentation Centre, an activist-run monitoring group, barrel bombings killed at least 3,124 civilians and 35 rebel fighters in Aleppo province alone over over a period. The figures of deaths for Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and the Ukraine, speak volumes of human tragedy occasioned by man’s disagreement with man, and the resultant man’s inhumanity to man.
Why is mankind so numbed to savagery and bloodletting?
The recent history of mankind reads like a catalogue of failed leaderships and the disconnect between leaders and the led. The failure of leadership is the cause of injustices for which those with dissenting views suffer unbearably until in time, they take up arms against the system and the State. In most regimes, humanism has died, with people’s representatives driven not any longer by selfless service, but by greed and avarice, especially at the expense of the disadvantaged. Power, whether political or economic, tends today, to serve only the insatiable desires and whims of the minority opportune 10% or even less. The remaining 90% is balkanised into warring colonies of support of causes and individuals that in turn only enable the leaders to attain their selfish aims.
In Africa, poor leaders have failed to use vast resources available naturally to provide for the common folk and protect from vagaries. Because communication has made the world smaller, people in backward countries can cheaply afford a view of life in functioning societies, and once hearts are set, it is the lot of mankind to brave odds in order to find the picture-perfect existence. In the beginning, it was enough to migrate to seemingly functioning North African and Arab societies. Then the Arab Spring occurred. Tunisia, Yemen, then Libya all collapsed setting off a gaping corridor to the West. Thus today, the West is on edge, it is staring at human tragedy it cannot ignore, even as it is the causal effects of the neo-colonial destruction of socio-political systems, without full replacement.
World powers have imagined that they can lord themselves over smaller powers, determining a world order that suites their pleasures. They use their yardstick to foist their own ideals on the rest of the world, even if it is at the cost of individual freedoms. Yet, the limit of one man’s freedom is where the freedom of another man begins, in an interdependent world. Because you accept homosexuality and gay marriage, does not give you freedom to commit another to your norms considered warped. Because your culture permits certain liberties with your faith, is no licence for the application of the same liberties on other conservative faiths. You can not deliberately poke a finger in my eye just because I am weak, and you are strong, or I am poor and you are rich.
Yet in the world today, political powers commit themselves not only to promotion, but to enforcement of ignoble cultures, traditions and norms, to the extent of applying sanctions that threaten the survival of functioning regimes.
First and foremost therefore, leaders are to blame for the sad and despicable predicament of the world today. All other factors spin off from the factor of failed leaderships.