The Failure of Success
We have built a world on the basis of our point of view. We have looked at the world from the outside and tried to develop something which we felt is the quintessence of success. And we have succeeded. However we have failed in our success.
Our point of view has not considered the point of view of nature and its diverse flora and fauna. Nor has it considered the point of view of those who live on the periphery of society, the rejects whose existence does not matter, the economically poor, the emotionally starved, the challenged et al.
We have not listened to the cry of nature nor to the cry of the poor. In fact they are the same. Any damage to nature has consequences primarily for the deprived and the marginalised. They have the maximum to lose. They are the ones whose livelihoods get affected by floods and erosion, droughts and desertification, deforestation and overfishing and so on. Being forced to be displaced and becoming reluctant migrants.
Nature and the poor have no voice. And we have failed to give voice to their anguish. On the contrary we have crushed them, uprooted them, polluted them, and put them on the torture rack to be broken. We have failed humanity because we thought this world is only for human beings and that too for an exclusive set of coteried individuals who can design a life based on their insatiable desires to the exclusion of the rest. Those who can decide whose “life is unworthy of life”.
We have failed to listen with our point of being. This is the type of listening which allows the world to come within us and give us a total surround experience of the ecology of life. We have failed to listen to the unexpressed desires, concerns, pains and suffering of nature and the poor. We have lost our sensitivity to the dignity of the whole of life. We have not been inclusive. In fact we have been unidirectional and isolationist. We may have succeeded from a point of view but failed in a point of being.
And that is why the fear today of a revolt from both nature and the poor. The revolt has already begun. Natural calamities, unnatural weather and pandemics. And the rising tensions among the disadvantaged like Blacks, refugees, indigenous people, migrants, homeless, unemployed et al. We are witnessing both. COVID-19‘s ruthless progress and the heart wrenching trauma of migrants as they trudge hundreds of miles to their village homes. Their excruciating ordeal has resulted in some of them resorting to rioting. As Martin Luther King Jr. said “A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.” But the full fury is still some distance away from ravaging our homes, businesses and lives as both nature and the discarded wreak havoc over the whole of mankind for being ignored and taken for granted for too long.
It is a wake- up call to restore and heal both nature and the poor. We have hit the reset button. We need to restart as it were from ground zero.
