Tired after hours of work and back home, you finally throw your shell of a body on the couch for some winding down; first the news. The TV is switched on, and… “I don’t want to watch action film; at least not now. I just want to find out what has been happening in the world.” After all, the strangest and most bizarre things are happening in this world by the hour and you don’t want to miss out on any of them. You fumble with the remote. Hey, but it is already set on news channel! All that ‘Die Hard’, ‘Demolition Man’ stuff on your favorite news channel! Have the Netflix guys taken over!
Look, if you tune to a news channel and for a moment think the satellite operators have messed up the news and movie channels you’ll be pardoned for your innocence. Your TV screen is filled with what appears to be a sequel to 2012! (By the way, we Ethiopians are on year 2012. Just for the sake of it! I’ve come across a lady who told me the guys who made 2012 were probably referring to the Ethiopian calendar. Nice narrative, isn’t it?) With so much chaos and destruction happening everywhere, nothing is easier than connecting such dots and trying to squeeze out the plausible from the weird. What we have been seeing coming out of ‘the land of the free, the home of the brave’ would have appeared to be vintage Hollywood, had it not been pandemonium happening in real time. And it is in no way nice to watch.
The brazen violence, the scale of destruction, the human brutality, and the shocking political polarization that’s marring intelligent discussion of the problem is denting the image of Paradiseon-earth America which remained implanted in our minds for ages.
The video of the killing was shocking. I mean a forty-plus year old man pinned by the cruelest knee one can imagine of calling for his mom three years after her death! Even the most creative mind wouldn’t have thought of events more is chilling. How can any human being, and a law officer at that, act so cruelly! What in the world was he thinking! Many are talking about it! “Did you see the news last night?” no wonder there is a personal angle to it for most of us. Being a human being is enough to be touched to the core by those words which will not go away any time soon; “Please I can’t breathe!”
A fellow I know was trying to convince me over the phone that what was happening over there was none of our business; His was “What happens in America, stays in America,’ sort of argument. Maybe; but not this time. It’s our business! With hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians living and working there and with hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions more back home depending on the remittances the diaspora community sends home, whose business can it be if it wasn’t ours! Coming at the height of the pandemic which is said to have affected many of Ethiopians, all the nightmare on the streets of US cities worries us as much as it worries them.
The level of violence is appalling. Not that we, ourselves, are not given to violence. Worse things have happened here. This that will come back to haunt us for quite a long time. But such scenes in, of all places, America! Look, maybe if this mayhem was playing out on the streets of most other places the attention it generates wouldn’t have been half as passionate. There were times when most of us thought that country was the earthly prototype of Heaven. Only going to Heaven came on top of going to America. The land of the loftiest of freedoms where the moral high ground was too elevated for the rest of the world to achieve. That, for decades, was the picture chiseled in our mind: a picture that is now becoming unrecognizable.
In the past few years, many of us have been trying to put reality and illusion in their rightful places. After all, the roads are not paved with gold! All of a sudden the realization strikes that all the things Hollywood has, rather shrewdly, made us to believe to be true were nothing but hallucinations.
America isn’t at present in good position. The Covid-19 pandemic has thinned the backbone of the most powerful country on earth. Forty million people out of work in just a few months! If a struggling screenwriter wrote a script about forty million unemployed Americans producers would have thrown it, and probably him, out the window “Why doesn’t he write something more realistic, like, Steven Segal punching the daylight out of a hundred-plus guys without receiving a single blow himself!”
What’s interesting is that things we used to hear in what are called third-word nations have now become common in a country everyone has been looking up to. Take the claims about ill-willed intruders hijacking the protests. (Sounds familiar, doesn’t it!) Coming from that part of the world nothing could be more interesting. One side blames the far left, and the other the far right. Pure politics, many would tell you. But one thing both sides seem to agree on is there were troublemakers with ulterior motives to change peaceful gatherings into virtual pandemonium. Nothing could be more telling about a world that is really in the midst of some complete turnaround.
Seeing American politics so polarized, so divisive, so hate-filled doesn’t do any good to people’s hopes of a better world. True, we are still in times where when Washington coughs, the rest of the world catches the cold. But, the world is changing, in more ways than one. We only wish these changes carry much fewer dark clouds than they are now. We hope things will cool down in ways that will instill in us hopes of a better and more compassionate world. The song we want to hear from across the oceans is “From America with love;” Nothing less.
The Ethiopian herald June 5,2020
