Unwanted, unfair, unkind. And inhuman too.

SABBATICAL NOTES. 17 JULY 2014. FRIDAY. N1. 
Unwanted, unfair, unkind. And inhuman too. 

TO DIE uselessly is the worst form of death. 

How can 295 people be sacrificed in the altar called human freedom when those who called for the death of these people do not know at all the meaning of what they are fighting for? 

It is not a number, this. 

One life lost makes humanity poorer. 

No person should ever be sacrificed in the altar of anything that people are fighting for even if abstractions sometimes lose their sense when tested against the inhumanity of our methods.

Flight 17 of the Malaysian Airlines was doomed in the beginning. Whoever called the shots to shoot it down must be answerable to the every life lost in this tragedy.

The names are coming in and this unfamiliar incident becomes less and less of a strange thing. The logic of association begins to tell the story that should not have happened.

We look at the picture gallery and the objects that go with some of the names lie on the ground ready for picking by the same hands that own them.

But these hands are not longer there, the severance of the owner and the object she owns complete, final, forever.

Apart from the 100 conference participants, AIDS activists all, many others perhaps were dreaming of a good time in Kuala Lumpur, thinking of sipping coconut water straight from the nut.

Or, watching the sun rise from a mountainside.

Or, thinking of a poem while the sun sets in some Malaysian sea somewhere in that vast land.

The Hague is mourning. We hear Amsterdam grieving. The whole of Holland wails.

And we all ought to come to grief.

For ourselves.

Because this world we live in is not kind, as we human beings have refused to learn to be kind.

Or that have stopped becoming kind.