I think. Sometimes.
"Always be capable of feeling...any injustice commited against anyone, anywhere in the world"
Che Guevara
(Talk about succumbing to cliches!)
I came across an entry from Nate the other day that made me think. Now, while I can't profess the same degree of admiration for Karim Raslan's writing as she does (it's a personal question of taste) nor do I know the extent of his role as a social-political commentator (apart from an overly-emotional rant against blue roofs and his brief stint in jail for participating in the East Timor conferenceinthe early 90s), I do however believe in the power of the Word, be it written or spoken. And since I have been accused of being an unforgiving cynic more than once recently, may I underline the hugeness of my stating a strong belief in anything.
If words were so harmless, then why the constant theme of persecution against dissident writers throughout history? The most horrific case I can think of in the modern world is possibly the murder of Ken Saro Wiwa by the government of Nigeria, with the tacit complicity of Shell. Under the Apartheid Regime of South Africa, some dissidents, notably perhaps Steve Biko were considered ‘Banned Persons’ and one of their restrictions, along with other ridiculous ones like not being allowed to be in the same room with more than one other person, was a ban of writing.
The government of a certain South East Asian country located between Thailand and Singapore recently raided the offices of an online newspaper because the editors of said newspaper had the gall to publish an allegedly seditious letter to the editors, despite the fact that the letter-writer had no connections whatsoever to the paper, apart from being a reader. If words were so unimportant, then why the paranoid tendencies of governments to censor words, to punish writers, and at the other extreme, abuse words for propaganda. Some have said that Goebbels was as powerful as Hitler in Nazi Germany.
Words raise consciousness, and it is through consciousness that change is effected. Even if all but one reader of a social commentary does more than return to the mundanity of ‘real life’ without using up a single synapse to think about what he or she has read, even if the writer’s or orator’s activities never extend beyond the realm of commentary, there will come a time when amongst the thousands of opinion pieces, amongst the hundreds of speeches, someone somewhere will be inspired to do great things for humanity, simply by writing, or listening.
Perhaps I may deluding myself. Perhaps I would like to believe that my miniscule corner of the Web, which I sometimes believe is being used as my own platform for contributing (however insignificantly) to the betterment of humanity, serves some other purpose apart from serving my own egotistical narcissism. Perhaps in truth, I write more about the world than my own life because I believe that my life is devoid of anything that may be of any interest whatsoever, ie., variations along the theme of “I went to class/skived class today, went home and dedicated the rest of the day to time suckage via the Net/TV”. Perhaps all I have been doing is constructing nothing more than elaborate candy floss, which while giving the impression of substance dissolves as soon as it touches your tongue, leaving nothing more than a sickly sweet aftertaste.
Heck, I may even be serving the blandest cardboard in the world.
But you know what? I don’t think I care, because this is just what I do. And it's the least that I can do.
nads went at 00:56