It is sureal to imagine that only miles away in a rural subsistence farming village mothers with babies fastened to their backs are being pursued by bloodthirsty rebels--rejects from the society of civilized humankind. It boggles the mind that nearly 30,000 humans in Gaza have been murdered in cold blood by a veritable death squad. We stand in horror and awe at these barbaric displays of inhumanity as though they were the first of their kind. But they are not.
We know most of the conflict today has a definite origin. But perhaps the world stands by with hands tied, not because we don't know what to do--but because we repeatedly fail to do what we know to do. Maybe we have never seen the 'purpetrators' as the villans that they are in the telling of a more palletable story. And that dissonance only happens by a carefully crafted narrative we tell ourselves and sell to others. It is a false narrative we have all come to believe and buy into at varying levels for our own self- interest or comfort.
And it is the narrative that is changing our world today. Increasingly the lies of old are crumbling like the walls of an antiquated coliseum. We see this most ardently pkayed out in journalism, foreign policy and media. In journalsim there is a fierce debate about narrative, and that matters because stories are poweful. We must nevwr forget, that every life is a story, even that desperate Congolese mother escaping barefoot in the night with only a few belongings and her baby. It iy is her story. But it is a story that often goes untold.
It is why we can easily quote numbers and figures on conflucts, rebels and IDPs without understanding the gravity of it. It is a PR narrative that transforms bitter tribalists into loving "pan-Africanists." A natrative that tell farmers losing their entire livilhood that green energy and sanctions will fix their devastation. It is a narrative that tells us that the growth and prosperity of another state is a threat to world peace. Or, that deploying a military to residential areas to commit genocide is self-defense.
The trouble is that when we see genocide, the popular narrative gaslights us, and tells us our eyes see something else. It is a lullaby that we have accepted for a long time. We accept that the Native American Genocide was actually Manifest Destiny. We remember Auschwitz, but forget Namibia. We make movies about Idi Amin, but conveniently forget the Butcher of Belgium who killed millions in Congo (and whose spirit lives on in the hearts and hands of the genocide rebels invading Eastern Congo). We ignore the centuries of trafficking and violence against Black Americans, but dismiss their right to repair for the crimes against humanity committed they endured.
When the narratives are not told truthfully and often ignored; we open an avenue for competing false narratives that call invaders heroes and pirates explorers. There was another veto at the UN this week--it sounds nicer when you say veto, because it takes out all of the nasty connotations. It leaves us all wondering what is the point of a world body, or even a regional body, if it cannot stop innocent people from being killed?
We must undo the tall tales of the past that whitewash crimes against humanity as heroic feats of exploration. We must understand the power of an accurate narrative to save lives and prevent future crisis. We say never again, but it happens again, because we refuse to tell the story as it actually is. We are fearful to hurt the feelings and fantasies we have of those who went before us, even if we must painfully admit what awful men they were.
Abuse does not stop just because the victim pretends it is not happening. And no matter if we are related or how much we love someone--it does not change their actions and its impact on humanity. Truth heals, lies conceal.
Yes, there remains a necessity to rally the brigade of honest independent journalist, media and editors. But, there is also a need for transparency among historians, sociologists, lawyers, law enforcement, parents, educators and people of faith to tell accurate stories too. The narrative does not end at media, but continues to the daily conversations we have and the ways in which we interface with the truth. It starts with the stories we tell ourselves.
We allow Congo to be afflicted by the cowardly, because there is a lie in the narrative, which we refuse to face. Gaza is besieged because of the stories we tell ourselves about made-up rules and currency that can never add up to the loss of human life. We allow Sudan to burn for years, because we have accepted a narrative that only justifies more carnage.
Dare to have the courage to tell stories as they are, and not as we wish them to be. We must admit that somewhere along the path, we have lost the way . . . The way to our own humanity.
#congoisbleeding
#onelove
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