"What is life worth living?"Ernest Hemingway said, "The world breaks everyone...those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially." This quote came to my mind as I reflected on the impending fate of Dr Kublalsingh. He is left to die before our very eyes since the very premise of a hunger strike is absent in our country.
A hunger strike is a form of protest against an event and is linked to an issue crucial to a better life. It is not intended to end life and is different from suicide where the aim is to die. The basic premise is that no one can be indifferent to watching another human being die. But as we have witnessed that is not applicable here in our beloved country. Even some religious leaders have demonstrated that political calculations trump human caring.
The argument that to give in to this action will give rise to others going on hunger strikes is specious. In 1920 Bernard Shaw wrote, "scoundrels do not hunger strike nor do ruffians...this is why repeated surrenders by governments have conferred no impunity on ordinary crime." Few men rise to this bar of selflessness.In the immediate case the leaders of the present Government were passionate initiators/advocates of the resistance to the very leg of the proposed highway. They make clear the dictum "politics has a morality of its own" and that professional integrity matters less than political considerations. This is the context for the AG's creation of illusions about the court processes, the miscasting of the HRM's objections and the utter disregard of the Armstrong committee.
There are those among us who would have Dr Kublalsingh not engage in such protests, holding the view that there are other ways of making the point.But do other means work? Successive governments ignore the general public and burning tyres have proven to have no real lasting effect. One of the functions of this expression is to encourage discussion. But we do not wish to discuss anything, including Ebola, when there is Carnival in the air.
We prefer to give our governments licence to loot the treasury and our children's future than to confront the issues. We do not recognise that once we allow the silencing of the voice of opposition we are on the downward path of increasingly repressive means that leads to terror where we all live in fear. We ought to contemplate the words of Martin Luther King "if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live."
We have the choice of Braveheart, the Scottish warrior: "Fight and you may die. Run and you will live at least for a while....and dying in your bed many years from now would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance to come back and tell our enemies that they may take our lives but never our freedom."
Noble Philip,
Blue Range