There Is Love Under The Masquerade Of Protest
There is love, for this I am sure. Sitting alone feeling the solitude of an old shadow I once used to acknowledge I meditate with time on the last true season. The indomitable dream of a prayer released from its doctrine, or of a promise born from outside a human mouth, or for want of a better image, the steeper side of a reality that allows one to sleep undisturbed inside the delicate tapestry of a Love we all deserve to be bound to.
The travesty is deep running, we have destroyed to conquer the ever-changing and our lives and aspirations have been designed around the clutches of an insatiable greed. None of this is new. These revelations I am about to propose are from a burning book that sings aloud into an open heaven, with flames that live only to cascade, and still our little earth begs to be healed. Where that same death comes from can only be answered by those who propagate its function. By those privileged and unabashed, those charitable, those forever caring, and those who deny the paradox they have so perfectly become bequeathed in. I have seen you march against the tyranny of invasion, of dominance and repeating genocide. I have heard your firm objections, your sharp hymns of disdain, I have watched your programs that house the most exuberant display of rhetoric in both idea and conviction, yet I have been silent, silent for far too long – trapped in a fixed state of contemplation, bewilderment and disbelief.
For when these events draw close their end I see how quick those same fervent faces turn unwittingly genial. How carefully they pack away their broad placards and their panoply of paraphernalia with slogans boldly etched in waterproof felt tip. Their clothes plain and unbranded, their choice of hairstyle wild yet inoffensive, their nails at times gathering all the dark grit of such a demanding campaign, but their cars all the while remain pristine, their homes diligently maintained by the insurmountable hand of a middle aged woman who practices the basic sounds of the English language against a thick Slavic tongue. I have seen these people, I know these people, these charlatans of the age who after all their weekend marching, their protests and megaphone revolutions have come to reveal the true shape their concern affords them. The infinite famine of babies younger than seeds. The malevolent treatment of women who without fault or blame are forced to bite down upon their own new teeth whilst enduring the spikes and pleasures of some invented hell. The bullets that sleep inside a poor farmers organ, the duress, the racial profiling, the branding of crime and criminal, the bombs and the bombs and the bombs which go ahead to deform the earth’s bleeding womb.
Could it be that those individuals, those altruistic avengers who position themselves to fight the evil powers, who give up their free time and their weekends to make a difference to our society, were in fact the same ones who without pause turned to condemn the uprising of our British youth last month? The same ones to fall victim to the pernicious bouts of propaganda that demonized past leaders, the same ones to call Moammar Gadhafi a champion despot? That these self proclaimed philanthropists, activists and seekers of equality and reparations were the same ones to take into their hands the sour ingredient of disdain and racism and with it create their most filling dish. The nature of the human is far from being self-evident however certain unassailable truths arise from moments of domestic rebellion and backlash. There were no defiant well crafted placards for the victims of police brutality, nor were there any executive cars waiting to be driven home at the day’s end - instead all that remained was the quiet reality that whispered, ‘when a crisis does not look like me I have no real affiliation to it.’
But regardless of it all there is still Love. Within the crammed homes of the destitute, the targeted and the exempt there is a gentle hope flickering, making circles around its people, and so it is within this that all salvation will now and forever reside. I for one do not ask for those disparate members of an illusionary class or proposed race to lend their charity to the very souls who society regards as being ‘unfortunate’, for it must be said that fortune in the 21st century is a fickle product of status, gender and race. So yes there is Love in England, in Iraq, in Somalia, in Libya, in Sudan, in the Congo, in Palestine and the U.S and all other regions slowly being deafened by the instruments of war, racism and dominance. But those who masquerade under the banner of charity, of peace and solidarity need not bother or do so if only to try and quieten the profound guilt that disturbs the rapture of their tireless, unmarred dreams.
Anthony Anaxagorou
