The unmeasured wrath of men is stifling the life out of me. In the recent past, anger is bursting at the seams like the swell of flooding waves engulfing mortals, beasts, fields, villages and cities alike. In my country everyone is angry; not only angry but wrathful. Wrath has the underlying implications of revenge, of anger lashing out to destroy whatever comes in its way, it is a venting out in ugliness, it is unrestrained resistance.
When I look at men on the streets, talk to people on the phone, turn on the Tv and listen to experts giving their two-bits on the situation in the country; when I engage with others I generally find a hurry-ness, an impatience, an irritation in people at their circumstances. It is said man is his circumstance, therefore we are but a people defined by our anger which has gone wild and out of control; an anger that is now wrath, seeking its victim.
What is making us so angry is the question. And the answer is certainly evading me - of course, as a nation (if I dare say I call us) we are scattered like a broken string of pearls or perhaps the chips of a shattered glass vase. We have no rational and definite sense of identity, of belonging; our language is divided and made inexplicable. The common symbols such as the meaning of words, of a true understanding of a sentence is lost amongst us. The rich and the precious speak a lingo that is lost on the common man. The lingua of the streets is anathema to the rich. The languages of the land divide us further, alienate us from each other for we simply do not understand what our country men mean when they talk in a regional dialect. Are we like the citizens of Babylon? who were visited by the wrath of god, and their tongues became mere babble?
Our leaders demand revenge. We seek revenge. Our political slogans have the word revenge in them. Why so? I believe we are all angry at ourselves but do not have the tenacity to face up to it; it has now dawned on us that we have failed ourselves and instead of trying to analyze and unfathom the cause of this failure, we push it deep inside ourselves and deny it. From this suppression of feelings of not doing our best, and our latent anger we do the next easiest thing - blame. We blame our history, we blame our leaders, we blame the army, we blame everything else.
I am time and again reminded of Samuel Beckett's play 'Waiting for Godot' - where the forsaken characters keep waiting and hoping for help to come and somehow magically rescue them from their inertia - of course, the help, in shape of Godot never arrives. We are also waiting for a messiah to come deliver us, who is no where near coming. Any deliverance needed has to be self-authored.
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