Just chose to watch a TVO documentary on the Rwandan genocide instead of The Apprentice. And it was an active choice, I completely admit that most of me wanted to watch The Apprentice. I pulled myself away too so that I’d watch something that wouldn’t push me further into my box.
How can we all be sitting down every night, and most choose to watch pretty white people scheme to get more money, at the same time as someone is trying to tell us about the loss of 800,000 people. How do you reconcile that? Is it that we just physically can’t comprehend the juxtaposition? I feel like I can’t. I can’t contain that in my body – I can’t make sense of what that means about the world.
How could I not know that 800,000 people were slaughtered? How could I not know that? That every day people went out with knives and hacked people until they died. Hundreds of thousands of times. How can I already be starting to feel numb again, a few sentences later.
How can we not be doing better than this?
Praise-singers are fat, Truth lean,
Carrion-eaters swarm the streets,
Infant limbs between their teeth
Those who know no thing
Trade wisdom with believers in nothing
Between faith and farce a common creed
Do not take my anger away
My stubborn noun, my adjective which,
Like the scorpion, carries a burning tale
(“Ode to Anger” – Niyi Osundare)