I can't breathe

The words inscribed at the Statue of Liberty brings out the affirmation and the aspiration of the people of America. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” (from  the sonnet of Emma Lazarus)

I can’t breathe… I can’t breathe. The last words of George Floyd who had a cruel death in the hands of the police in Minneapolis, USA recently, reverberate across the world today, making everyone to rethink and contemplate on the urgent need for securing ‘dignity’ and ‘equality’ to every person irrespective of caste, colour or creed. It’s a wake-up call for all of us to think and act – Americans as well as people across every nation. 

What has happened in the death of George Floyd is tragic and unjust. Instead of accountability, the guardians of law have displayed irresponsibility and brutality. The very people who are mandated to protect the citizens, have turned to be perpetrators of violence, in a disgraceful manner. At the same time, violence and riots and looting is equally disgraceful in any democratic system and we should condemn it strongly.

Martin Luther King Jr., in his famous speech delivered on 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington said, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’

“I can’t breathe” describes the circumstances faced by many who are being choked by a system that treats different classes of people unequally. All people have the right to breathe. All have the right to education and health care. All have the right to live peacefully and without oppression. All have the right to live with dignity and respect. None can deny it. 

Our life consists in our constantly rising above our limitations, our prejudices, and in the process growing ‘from truth to truth’. I like what Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize Winner said “If each person is created in God’s image, it means that oppression and injustice are not merely evil – which they are – and not just painful – which they frequently will be for the victim – it means they are blasphemous! It is like spitting in the face of God.”

Oppression and injustice have no place in any society where God's values and God's standards permeate to every level. We love our neighbours when we treat them as equals with dignity and respect, in protection as well as in compassion.  Each one of us has a responsibility in ensuring ‘dignity and equality’, ‘justice and liberty’ as given in our Constitution. We cannot allow an unequal system to take our breath away. 

Breath is life.