I guess that's one crucial reason why this becomes a convenient outlet for me.
And in the event that these conversations yield no fruit, would they have been in vain?
Certainly not.
Not IF I have managed to unsettle others in the process.
Not if I'm not alone in this.
For I do not want to be unsettled alone.
I'm unsettled by the numbers on our lives.
The numbers which replace our lives when we die, unsettle me.
I am more unsettled by the number being done on us while we still live.
I am one who truly cannot settle with this.
I'm unsettled that many are still made to only amount to data in a stats report.
It's troubling.
That the value of our lives are reduced to black pawn pieces used in a chess game.
Except when we fall, we do not get to 'play again'... no, for they don't have the power to put the life back into our empty bodies.
The numbers are dehumanizing.
Where do we even begin unpacking how behind every number there is an infant that becomes an orphan or a spouse losing a bread winner? The dark figures of crime further forming a dark cloud over the perception we have of ourselves, troubles.
When the poverty is inhumane along with the racism affecting us.
(I too want to ask: what is the price of a black man's life?)
Surely we are more than just numbers.
I write as one who does not believe that this can be over iterated.
There is an urgency for conscious dialogues in our circles of engagement.
We are more than just figures. We are more than just variables.
I feel these are the flowers we need to give each other while we are still living.
Black lives matter too.
The fear of just amounting to a statistic grips those who know they form part of a generation. It's startling.
Though expressed differently, we do see it in the life-long concerns people have in building their names, and the legacies they want to leave behind.
These are noble ambitions and worthwhile endeavours.
Such accolades of life cannot be fully expressed in a number.
It is the aspirations of the fallen young ones who died revolting which unsettles me the most.
How Hector Pieterson also had ambitions, dreams and hopes.
He was human.
He was a person.
He was a priceless embodiment of sacred life.
Him and his classmates...and they were many.
Their lives mattered too.
Numbers will never justify the meaning of their lives lost.
At this stage, there is a social war against a capitalism that knows no morality.
There is a need to have the statistics humanized again.
An audience needs to be cogniscant of the reality that the masses are human beings too.
Both the casualties of the past and the present matter.
No human life should just amount to a mere statistic.
I am hoping for empathy on the part of those who encounter accounts of lost lives from now on.
ALTHOUGH the media may report 'numbers', we should perceive deaths for what they are: a plethora of human experiences snuffed from the face of the earth.
It's axiomatic for me to point out how the masses today still live in standards below par... and how behind every number there's a family that is crying.
It really is unsettling.
This leaves me further unsettled when I think what meaning this highlights regarding the sacrifices made in the struggle. How land is not the only thing apartheid took away from us.
How the most precious of lost gifts are innocent black lives we cannot claim back.
