Maura O'Connel sang "Living in These Troubled Times", and when prompted to write this post I felt the words resonate inside me.
I must admit, I feel like I've no right to say what it means to live in troubling times. I was born and raised by both my mother and father in a time and country untouched by the bloodshed of violence and war. I've only ever known death through the nature of disease, and never felt the injustice of a system stigmatizing me. I was given the privilege of a safe home, a warm family and higher education.
But these are troubling times. I am a bystander to the prejudice and discrimination that plays out on the papers and screens I occasionally choose to view. Most of the time, I feel helpless. What can I do? The immensity and sheer weight of the responsibility is daunting, at best. Terrifying, realistically. Seemingly impossible, at its worst. The calamity of climate change, pestilence of poverty and irrational savagery of war between nations and religions makes even the hardest heart weep. What can I do? What can we do...?
There is a quote that says, "we have the night in order to see the stars." There are various ways I interpreted this and ways in which it was meant to be interpreted. Firstly, it says that the light of success can only be seen when accompanied by the darkness of failure. From experience, I know this to be true. Another meaning I gleaned from this quote is the following: it is when the world is at its darkest that the real beauty of human beings shine. Where there is violence, hate and war, there also lives peace, love and hope. Darkness is a lack of light. Light is also due to the lack of darkness. If we view these two as inseparable, then we must understand that the only solution is constant vigilance. The fight, ironically, for peace and equity is a never ending one. The only thing that keeps those stars alive is hope; hope that humanity can find a way to reconcile, forgive and save one another - before too much is lost during these troubled times.