Do you want to know?

The space in my skull is reverberating with cliches, academic verbiage about governance and democratic ideologies, fragmented thoughts about dreams deferred, hopes arisen and squashed by neoliberal machineries of greed and fear.

Nostalgia for the moment an oppressed, bloodied populace rejoiced in the release of a man imprisoned for 27 years whose fist was raised in triumph. Deep sorrow that the silences he fought against is rising once more in a new guise.

There are memories of Grant Park, a sated, jubilant electorate walking the streets of Michigan Avenue nursing their dreams of a new global order. We dared to dream the end of murder in the name of an ideology masquerading as safety. We dared to hope that the fear of terror would not reign terror on faraway others who dared to own the fuel that drives an overblown economy. That dream is tainted by the too soon aborted death of 'Yes, we can'.

We are trapped in traditions of suspicion, fear and greed. Fear of the poor, the thieving elite, greedily stroking our own comfort, suspicious of those who dare to sully our pleasures by asking us to recognise their plight. Our governments want to and do limit our right to know.

A young man was shot just this week, another took his own life last week.

I wonder how many wish to know? How many would tear themselves away from the newest celebrity scandal to feel, not the quasi-affect that makes them feel like good moral people, for their others? How many care enough to break the traditions of turning their face up and ahead to the beauty of the mountain when they drive past the fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, lovers, husbands, wives, sons and daughters living without adequate shelter on the highways? How many effect their habitual nod in complacence when human beings, who bleed and love and laugh and cry, are killed and beaten so that their landscapes are not sullied? How many would be grateful if silence once more reigns across this land so they can claim they did not know?  How many would prefer to just not know?

I too am afraid. I do not want to know the answer to these questions. I am suspicious that my greedy need to believe will not be satisfied. 

If we are not careful all the deaths and blighted lives that haunt our collective psyches will be silenced. And when it is one of ours, we will have lost the right to complain for we will have given away our right to know.

If you haven't done so yet, sign the Right to Know petition http://www.r2k.org.za/