32 Days of Christmas: Day 12
When you watch documentaries about the atrocities unfolding in Sudan, your heart bleeds for people you have never met. You wonder how human beings can inflict such horrors on others. And Sudan is not alone. We have heard of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a land that has never known peace. Many around the world do not even know what King Leopold II did in Congo in his colonial rule, nor what Vasco da Gama and his Portuguese counterparts did along the coasts of Dar es Salaam and Mombasa. The same can be said of the French throughout West Africa, or the British in the Americas. Writing about the British alone could fill volumes, detailing their actions in India and throughout much of the world. And even now, we do not fully grasp the inhumane deeds of ancient civilizations like the Romans, the Mongols, or the Ottomans.
These are stories that historians have at times distorted and at other times revealed in stark truth. Many of them make the Sudan conflict seem small by comparison, yet witnessing such brutality in my own lifetime still feels unbearable.
I grew up thinking that black–white racism was the worst cruelty humans were capable of, until I read about Hitler’s extermination of Jews and Poles. Until I learned about the West African slave trade and discovered that, in many cases, it was Africans who sold their fellow Africans to Europeans. It made a dark kind of sense: the Europeans were not strong enough to confront united African societies head-on, so they relied on the greed of certain chiefs and communities willing to sell their own.
And then it all became painfully clear that it does not matter what color your skin is, what language you speak, how educated or ignorant you may be, or which deity you worship—Muhammad, Christ, or none at all. It does not matter whether you stand on ancestral land or in a foreign place. Humans always want to climb to the top of the food chain. Once someone tastes power the simple joys of life no longer satisfy. They want to control every trade route crossing their doorstep, even if it means selling their neighbor for a handful of coins. Even if it means slaughtering civilians and innocent people who want no part of the conflict. Indifference no longer protects anyone. Power is the prize, and humans will do literally anything to seize it.
Americans may seem crazy, but they are not entirely wrong to believe in the existence of aliens. What they get wrong, I think, is the imagery. Just as the devil is not a red creature with horns and a tail, I doubt aliens are bug-eyed beings flying around in shiny discs, speaking in robotic tones. I imagine aliens simply as living creatures in other worlds, looking down at Earth and shaking their heads, warning their children never to become “like those humans.” I believe even God must look upon His creation with both hurt and anger in His immortal soul.
And the saddest part is that I can hardly convince myself we will ever change. Greed is corrosive. It spreads like a plague. I believe it can be slowed, but never fully erased.
The rise of social media—and platforms like this blog—only amplifies the problem. Once wars were constant but distant. Communities tended their livestock, married and gave their children in marriage, raised families, feasted and made merry—unaware that far away another village had been invaded and sold into slavery to a people they had never even seen. People went about their lives believing that the peace as far as their eyes could see was the natural state of the world.
But now we see everything. We see clearly what humans are capable of doing to one another. When reason is thrown to the dogs, we become indistinguishable from wild animals. Perhaps even worse, for animals themselves must wonder what became of us. If it is not a coup in West Africa, it is a massacre in the south. If not an invasion in Western Asia, then political turmoil in the north. The only place seemingly left to guard is the heart—the sanctuary of the soul. A quiet refuge within ourselves, where we can silence the chaos outside.
Because the chaos outside is drawing closer, and closer, and closer.. until the war inside us, the innate instinct to survive, meets the war beyond us: humanity’s relentless hunger for power.
✍🏽Reagan.