March Of The Damned: The Second Wave
By Vishwamithra –
“Everything in moderation, including moderation.” ~ Oscar Wilde
They don’t need any political leadership, for the existing one is either shamelessly corrupt or hopelessly incompetent. They don’t need any motivation as the excruciating, psychological pain is enough to drive them to places where they had never been before. They don’t need any summons either. History has summoned them; the current circumstances have conspired to assemble them together as one single family, as one single community of Sri Lankans. No religion, no ethnic grouping, no allegiance to any political party can set them apart from each other. The current need is so desperate; it’s so immediate and its appeal is so irresistible.
A battered, condemned and a damned people banding together in order to express their collective anger, collective frustration and collective despair and asking their rulers to go home is not an alien concept to history. Its repetition generation after generation since the dawn of civilized governance has not ceased to wonder the simple mind and provoke the intelligent and wise. While, more often than not, the simple has agreed to follow the wise and intelligent, seldom has it failed to produce the desired results. Those who have not learnt have been condemned to relive the miseries and agonies of those who sat by and allowed the ruling murderers to continue.
A wise man once said that when material conditions of the majority continue to deteriorate and worsen, subjective conditions take over the process and attempt to finish the unfinished task at hand. Leadership devoid of any political bias and other artificial sociocultural divisions has finally realized that a second and probably the last wave needs new direction and even fresher impetus if it were to see to an anticipated end. How far has the movement matured, how far the movement gone in order to endure the insufferable pain and physical assault, one may not know as yet. But obliviousness of such end results should not deter the brave and courageous.
Ever since the swearing in of the new Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, our men and women have experienced only further corrosion of their day-to-day living instead of relief. Beaten by agonizing conditions and demand on sacrifice without any finality on the horizon, the people are now looking for any leadership that shows a glimmer of promise and a relaxation of the mind which they had not relished at least for a couple of years. When all hope is lost and dreams shattered, what else can they look to? Where else can they expect relief from? These burning questions without any plausible answers have been pounding the simple minds of the greater majority of our people. Offering that small window of relief and escape is no crime. Albeit the fact that the very notion that the current rulers are allegedly planning most unsavory and unorthodox, yet very crafty in implementation and diabolical in conception methods, they are sweating to step forward in an uprising with the aim of toppling a democratically elected government,.
Tears will undoubtedly drift along the sun-burnt cheeks of thousands of unsuspecting men and women; the cascading sweat and occasional blood-letting might impede the speed of the march. Yet, what other choice do they have? What alternative methods and strategic moves are left for them? When their children attempt to endure hunger without a cry of complaint and when the family’s daily sittings for a meal has been reduced to one a day, those empty and hungry stomachs shall demand that there should be a change, this time for good.
The proletariat does not need a more inviting condition for a march towards a meeting point of the damned. The damned has no other destination; they do not linger in their cushy drawing rooms watching television powered by generators despite the prolonged power cuts. The middleclass and the upper echelons of the societal ladder too might be going through some of their unique experiences in the midst of this crisis. With unforgivable apathy and almost total indifference hereto paid to their more unfortunate brethren, these merchants of human values who preferred more luxurious lifestyles would not hesitate this time from partaking of the same meal that has been served on their plates by their proletariat friends. Gone are the days of evening cocktail parties where they hobnobbed with their corrupt and vicious politicos. These politicos now cannot come out in the open. They are too afraid of the light that is shining on their sinful complexion and the pitiful nature as to how they are dealing with it.
A damned man could beg, borrow or steal to feed his child. A damned woman might be tempted to sell her body for a couple of bucks, for that is the only asset she has, in order to buy her baby’s needs, crying for milk and sweets. Thugs and sinners would resort to playing the free-market game of supply and demand, bartering a liter of gasoline for five hundred rupees more than the price at the tank. The damned will resort to any and all methods of bartering if such bartering brings about a relief from their daily stress of making their ends meet. Such is the dreadful fate of our people today.
One need not look any further; President Gotabaya Rajapaksa cannot go to his office; he was booed out of Parliament by its main elected representatives; Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe doesn’t seem to understand his own role in government and is being treated as a joker of the worst order. The optics of both President and Prime Minister laughing freely inside the well of the House of Parliament and being escorted away most unceremoniously by their cohorts was a terrible sight for the beholder. Oblivion to the real conditions in the country was not more aptly displayed by this duo of political reprobates.
Saturday, July 9 shall dawn; what it shall bring upon the country is yet to be seen and would be largely determined by the organizers of the mass demonstrations and protest all over the country, mainly centered in Colombo. While in the Pettah, the commercial hub of retail and wholesale markets which used to thrive on supply and demand on the days prior to the advent of this economic collapse, Buddhist Monks in hundreds collect themselves to perform Satyagraha; clergy of other religious denominations gather around them in case of need of emergency attendance. Saffron robe has value now and those who wore it for sinful purposes of dividing a community into fragments of meaningless individuals might be suffering in their own self-made hells.
The suffering would be universal and relief, if it comes, too shall be common and collective. However, major uprisings organized and called to order are not necessarily predictable; nor are they expected to proceed according the planners’ schedules. But what is constant in this convoluted equation is the dire need of the people, not necessarily waiting for a quick and immediate relief and solutions, but for the word to come out from a trustworthy leader of impeccable authenticity.
We don’t have a Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin or Trotsky. Yet, we do have some young men and women who happen to have fallen into the midst of our collective suffering and unbearable want of basic necessities. Extraordinary circumstances have fashioned some extraordinary leaders from amongst our youth. Whether they would finally succumb to the impulses and moods of power politics is yet to be seen. But let us not go there as yet. As a country, we have arrived at that threshold of change. He who hesitates now would be condemned to the dustbin of history. Only action and relentless action shall define and shape the movement and the collective desire of our people.
Yet, it is not an armed revolution; nor is it expected to end in violence. If such is the case which would lead to loss of life, damage to property and shedding of blood, the objectives and purpose of the movement shall be killed. But is it realistic to project an outcome of a mass movement that’s demanding the ouster of a democratically elected President and Parliament? Nevertheless, such hesitancy would certainly spell disaster when approaching a launch of a march of hundreds of thousands of hungry men and women. A peaceful transition of power from one set of rulers to an abstract phenomenon called the ‘people’ is rare in history. Have they provided for the weak? Is there provision for those who would need emergency medical attention if the participants fall in the face of fatigue, enemy attack, teargas or water cannons? Is there space or a tent for such exigencies?
Real planning is planning for all contingencies. Come what may, at the end of the day the participants need to stand, walk back or at least have enough strength to sit down. Sloganeering and mental strength alone would not carry one to the proverbial Promised Land. Mikhail Bakunin who is considered among the most influential figures of anarchism, once said thus: ‘By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward’. Our brothers and sisters have decided to launch the second wave of an uprising- once thought of as a near-impossibility; let not their hopes and dreams go to waste.
*The writer can be contacted at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com
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