From our wounds, we must heal

We've just turned a new leaf in India's history that closed one wound with the building of a temple. Like every other, this one redeemed itself, but in the process, it festered another - innocently, of course. As much as wounds need to be healed, we also need to recognise that it is wounds that cause other wounds in a perpetual cycle that we've set off for generations and decades now. The world has come far, in pain and time, with history repeating itself in bigger cycles than the last, on and on. 

Pain inspires justice; by that, I mean vengeance. And that inspires violence, which gives us these wounds. All this is because what we need is healing, and that's the only thing we never seek. 

Wounds can be of many kinds - the death of a loved one (or people), continuous cultural oppression, being robbed of identity and/or dignity, preventing people from opportunity, etc. Each wound is, first, personal, then multiplied by the community that feels it. For this, vengeance is natural. We tend to equate it to justice like blood for blood, eye for eye and hand for hand, but let's clearly identify the markers. 

Vengeance is about you (individually) and how you feel. It stops and ends there, feel being the keyword. It is momentary, if achieved, and doesn't resurrect what was lost. Justice is less about how you feel. It has a larger effect in light of the fact that many other people also have cause to feel this way. It looks at preventing the same thing from happening again to anyone else in the future - both by punishment for the responsible and/or restitution for the victim.  

Any wound will always be tragic and wrong. When we move from feelings to reality, we must accept that the loss of certain things will remain painful, how much ever we avenge them. The dead can't be brought back to life, and nothing else with ever be a substitute for the real thing. The pain stays, but unfortunately, we can't get back time. At best, we can address how to avoid this in the future. We can protect people's rights against similar loss. 

Instead of responding how we do, we get stuck in a loop of pain where someone keeps getting hurt and causes hurt in retaliation (hoping to address it). But there is reconciliation only in going past our loss, for our own good before we tackle the injustice for the good of everyone, once our motives to avenge die out—moving from self-centered vengeance to justice for everyone. 

In other words, we need to heal inside. 

Once done (or once we're well on our way in), we can address the issue without superimposing our pain over everyone else's and talk about true justice and not vengeance in its name. 

Most of us experience some loss, which we can't get back, like people who have died. When it comes to those that we can (e.g. cultural or religious power/rights), we need to do an ours vs. theirs check. Most times, this is a result of a power play between the two sides. We've innocently inherited our privilege, as much as someone else has lost out on them. It's entirely possible that we grew up with these privileges as our own identity when someone else should have had a lot more of it - only because their ancestors suffered, directly or indirectly, when our ancestors' took, or kept, that from them many moons ago.   

But we are not our parents' keepers, but those privileges are still us, i.e. our identity - the very reason we judtify fighting each other in a loop. It's natural for us to defend them to death.  We carry them forward in the process, creating the future. If ever, reconciliation can only happen when we understand which side of the fence we are on and see if we can help the other side up. Even if we can't trace the power play, we will be able to see the inequality - which we can correct by leveling it. That should not necessarily mean giving up what we have but destroying the walls of discrimination and bias that allowed them to, and some things to make up for lost time.

In the process of opening the doors to those on the other side of the fence, we will find something astonishing, maybe: that we are not all that different at all. Our differences only hide our similarities. We're reaching out for the same things, but just in very different ways. We shouldn't idolize our different identities beyond what makes us all the same in what we want, need and desire. 

If we don't break this loop, we inevitably deem everyone but ourselves as worthy of these things, when we all deserve them equally. That is the only discrimination that we need to avoid. From our wounds, we must rise above and heal.