Echo

History had a way of keeping us quiet. History had a way of keeping us in awe. We learnt about British conquests, and the fight for freedom, we learnt about the Spaniards and the things they did, and we learned about the suffragettes, and we said, “no more”. This age is different from the last one. Things that happened before won’t happen now. History is history.

We thought we were beyond that. We scoffed at the people of history, even as we learned about those that rose above. We thought we were better than them. This is the age of civilisation, we’re beyond the Dark Ages now. In this age, we won’t see concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, and World War type of destruction. 

This is the age of enlightenment, we have science and technology. We can see right to the beginning of the universe now, we’re coming close to cars that self-repair, we have kpop, we’re here in the bright, bright future of the Jetsons. We’re here in the age that all the people in the past dreamt of. This is the age of enlightenment; we won’t see people get dark behind the eyes. 

But now, slowly, as our eyes hollow, we’ve been seeing, we’ve been shown, and all of our happy ignorance is gone. Hiroshima holds no horror for us anymore. The Bengal famine, terrible as it was, has lost its ability to move us. The Native American genocide, the - I don’t know - Vlad the Impaler? Hitler. 

None of it has the same effect it once had. We’ve seen worse. Somehow, the words of history are getting erased by fresh blood. Nothing has the ability to shock us anymore.

I used to wonder what role I would play in our freedom struggle. I think at some point we’ve all wondered the same thing. Well, here’s the answer. We watch TV. We get back massages and foot reflexology. We meet our friends for lunch, and make plans to see movies. Now that we’re living in times that require heroes, we’re slowly starting to realise what being a hero costs, we’re slowly starting to realise that in the history books, we’re the crowd.  

But that’s the thing. We don’t all have to be Mahatma Gandhi. We don’t have to give speeches like Martin Luther King. As history starts to repeat itself, we also start to realise - history wasn’t entirely built by the heroes - history was built by the crowd. By the people who walked with Mahatma Gandhi, by the unknown faces at the Jallainwala Bagh, by the audience who sat and listened to Sojourner speak her Truth. 

It was us the crowd that won the war. 

So yeah, maybe we’re not the ones who get a page of the textbook, but those of us who stick with the truth, even in the quiet of our own hearts, we’re the ones that cause the subtle shift that ends up turning the world right again. 

We might not be the ones who talk loud, but the ones whose voices, in the end, have the loudest echo.