Strip naked.

Strip naked.

Strip naked to your aging flesh and deteriorating humanity and tell me if we are not the same? Tell me that we are  of the same demeanour and the same calibre. Tell me we have all that they have, that my blood is the same as anyone’s  that I may pick blindfolded from a crowd of total strangers.

It is as if humanity was made to be divided. Not just geographically, but in heart and spirit. It’s terrifying how the only beings on earth capable of infinite love deliberately chooses evil. Man was made to love, man was made to care, to understand, but we are purposeful in our hatred and repugnant in our conduct. This division of each other has been the whole reason for the massive traumatic events  recorded in history. This division will always render to be the only reason for destruction ever. 

Because we are so different in our ideologies and lives we see each other as opposing to our individual beliefs. Humanity is flawed beyond repair. Humanity’s  essential element in its core is that flawed nature. And because we are flawed, we are human. How it’s in our most primary nature to spot differences, to view it as a threat, to calculate and monitor what is not ours, to discriminate and protect what’s ours and discard everything otherwise. It’s an engrained human instinct- to not let another take control over something, even if its their own lives. The alpha complex.

This humanity is the divide between the Sinhala  the Tamil and the Muslim, the American and Africa. This is humanity’s flaw. Its most vile and demonic sides magnified and compelled against its own people. You see it everywhere. In conversations and thought, on media and every single moment we expose ourselves into this world.  We see how we look down on someone because  of the things they believe in, or how they choose to dress, how they speak and what they eat. We see this.

What we also see how we are  treated. How we talk about the  Muslim woman in the shopping mall with indignity because she wears a hijab – a terrorist  we say. How we look at the sweet Tamil girl with jasmines  in her hair and wonder what the hell she is doing in Colombo.. We look at the white man picking tomatoes in the market and call him a coloniser. Simple thoughts. What we don’t realize is it is also simple thoughts that lead to genocide and man slaughter-  things man is very capable of.
"It will offend you without context" my best friend said as I turned the first page of the Holy Quran. 

I knew where it was coming from. She said it from a familiar point of discrimination. It was the thing more familiar than rainstorms. It was something she was forced to feel, forced to say. The need to defend her belief  against  what I may think of it. The evident trace of the lack of democracy in a world that promises only it.

This experience  of how carefully people tread on topics of religion and nationality  is  too recognizable. It is with great love and greater fear they say the name of  their Gods. With this, you are obligated to feel ashamed to have created a setting in which one is afraid to feel secured. How we try to take away their essential reasons to live.

How can be discard something so precious? How can we stand as human beings and mock the faces of beliefs of Gods and benevolence? How can we, being so vulnerable and open to suffering ourselves, dictate how one ought to feel? What right do we have, in democracy or otherwise to strip away a woman right to follow her religion? A man right to say his prayers?
 
In a very Sri Lankan context its clearly observed that being Buddhist and Sinhala gives one that alpha complex. Being of the major community  it gives one a sense of rule above  other communities. Another one of those things we have created to usurp power over each other.  I too am a Sinhala Buddhist and I am openly and absolutely ashamed of it. 

We hold a 5000 year old culture and history with pride. We hold a language and religion with dignity to the utmost extend and yet with that same language we strike down innocent people. We silence them and mock them, call them fanatics and romantics. We laugh at Gods and are personally attacked by Hijabs and abayas,  in a Sinhala  man’s eyes every Tamil man is a terrorist  plotting to overthrow the government. 

Peace lies in understanding. Humanity lies in kindness. The kindness that extends to all humans  by humans despite their choice of words and religion. Because what a religion is, is a mechanism to sooth an ailing mind. Something to cure what’s broken and heal the parts of us beyond physical  repair. Gods help and that’s what makes it all so beautiful.  The colours they add to the lives of  people. The eccentric aroma of immortality that takes away human fears of death and sadness.  It is the cure for the heartache and the faliour. The hero that fills your pockets with love and give you things humans are incapable of giving each other in this world which is already so broken.

In something that is this beautiful  there is peace. It is rock solid proof that humans are, in some small and coherent way, is indeed capable of good. We created religions, for a thousand  years we fed into it and nourished it. If man was able to birth something so purely wonderful, then man is capable of love still. 
This is why I haven’t lost all faith in humanity. It is this only reason why humans will still remain to be beautiful. Because of this capacity to cause great pain do I believe that we are all so very much capable of greater love.

Thamarasi Natheesha Halpe