Less-ness

The faceless, nameless, pitiless and noiseless have died. Again. For no fault of theirs. The national and local conspiratorial silence buries them as abstract numbers. 81 butchered. 52 massacred. 74 slaughtered. Evening comes and is followed by dawn.

"Life" goes on.

But does it? For the bereaved, nothing can be farther from the truth. Innumerable tears understandingly shed will never bring to life the vacuity of bloody bodily digits nor will their dispirited mourning recall the dead from the beyond. No big guns will blaze, no national mourning held. No media focus, no local attention. In their cold, brutish, nasty and short experiential existence, it'll appear to them as if life has lost its meaning and purpose creating a lacuna that nothing will ever fill in much the same way. A pain that'll never go away. A festering sore that'll never heal. A brokenness that'll forever remain broken.

Death does that.

Especially when it could've been avoided and worse, when there was neither rhyme nor reason to the question of why it occurred. The fleetingness of rational closure is yet denied these mourners. The perpetrators are "criminal spirits", never apprehended to give account of their criminality, never made to face the "justice" of the system, never punished to enforce deterrence and nary an act to console those who have lost a loved individual or another for nothing. No, no such alien practice will come to pass. Bracketed by celebrated deaths of an Elechi Amadi and a Shinkafi, they, the bereaved, must also come to accept that "life" indeed goes on while themselves dying daily in their own share of facelessness and namelessness, pitilessness and noiselessness.

Broken, warts and all.

Life and Life

Today, at this present time and age, there's life and there's life. One is of utmost importance and is thus highly guarded, heavily protected, ultimately guaranteed, assuredly insured, and luxuriously lived. By contrast, the other just exists because there's still oxygen in the owner's lungs.

So, what we observe is that everything is done to keep life going in one set while the extinguishing of the flame of life in the other set arrives like twilight or dawn, one of those occurrences that we don't count as anything because it's all part of the natural stream of things. Evening comes and morning follows.

What sets life apart from life can be as flimsy as the surname you bear or as alterable as the level of social structure to which you belong. A concatenation of factors can mean that when one life is taken it's a national catastrophe or a death is recorded as part of the statistics. Two national coaches dying a week apart can raise questions of what's happening and have people worrying for the shelf-life of ex-footers while no one will ever know the names of those many whose lives were snuffed out when their communities were attacked as they innocently went about their daily hustles for meagre survival.

Life is not the same as life.

And it's not just national. It's as global as recent events in God's own country exemplify. For the presence or otherwise of melanin in your skin, your surviving a routine drive through town is not guaranteed. That's all. It doesn't get any flimsier. Whether it's argued that a majority of crimes are committed by those in that skin shade ad nauseum is beside the point. Life here is the focus.

Who decides that one is of more importance than the other? And on what basis? Those accidental cleavages of class distinctions? Racial taxonomies? Historical fractions? Anecdotal stereotyping? Bank accounts? Tribal sentiments? Nominal influence? Unequal fingers?

It must have appeared ingenious to declare at some point that "All Men Are Born Equal". It still is, in a sense. The thing is they don't stay just "born" for the rest of their lives. They grow. And somewhere along the line of leaving being born alive (in a castle or in a manger) to getting a life, equality ceases to exist.

The irony, no? Life is born and equality dies. Life is not life. There's life and there's life. Go figure!