You can’t look at Amal and turn away not feeling the pain and sadness. The haunting eyes of Amal Hussain says it all.
Amal was only seven-year-old. She lived in the current war-torn country that is Northern Yemen.
It is a Saudi-led war in Yemen and Amal’s family is affected when their province, Saada, borne the brunt of at least 18,000 Saudi-led airstrikes since 2015.
It reports that “Saada is also the homeland of the Houthi rebels, who control northern Yemen and are seen by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a proxy for rival Iran.”
But that little historical and political background means nothing to little Amal, who was dying of starvation as a result of severe famine.
The papers report that Amal was “at a health centre in Aslam, 145km north-west of the capital, Sanaa. She was lying in a bed with her mother. Nurses fed her every two hours with milk, but she was vomiting regularly and suffering from diarrhoea.”
All her doctor, Mekkia Mahdi, could do was to sit by her bed, “stroking her hair”. She tugged on ”Amal’s flaccid skin of her stick-like arms” and said: “Look, no meat. Only bones.”
Amal’s condition had been deteriorating since she was brought into the health centre and she was discharged because the centre had to make room for new patients.
Dr Mahdi urged the family to bring Amal to a nearby Doctors Without Borders hospital in Abs, but the family was broke.
Amal’s mother said: “I had no money to take her to the hospital. So I took her home.”Upon bringing Amal home, relief agencies provided some consolatory help like sugar and rice.
But it was not enough to save little Amal.
On 26 October 2018, “three days after she was discharged from the hospital,” Amal died.
Her mother said: “My heart is broken. Amal was always smiling. Now I’m worried for my other children.”
Lesson? One.
The world has to decide what she wants. Because, until she decides, innocent victims like Amal will continue to be born into a world whose main and only preoccupation is, well, herself.
Now, I can understand that we live in a self-centered world.
This is plain to see. This is also part of our evolved survival mechanism to care for self, to survive and flourish.
For if I cut my own finger, and see it bleeds, I will want immediate medical attention.
In a rich or well-off family, living in a society with good health facilities, thousands of miles away from war-torn country where Amal resides, my bleeding finger will receive the best treatment, the quickest relief, and in a day or two, I will be back to my air-conditioned office in a high-rise building to continue my zealous pursuit of wealth accumulation.
Now, if that bleeding finger should be that of my child’s, due to some careless play, I would spare no effort to rush her to the clinic for immediate treatment. I would not hesitate, even for a moment, seeing the tears in her eyes.Again, she would receive the fastest relief and her little world of play will resume as before.
But what if the bleeding finger is suffered by neither myself nor my child? What if the bleeding finger happens to someone I don’t even know like Amal?
And what if Amal is thousands of miles away from me, in a war-torn country, where innocent civilians like hers are merely collateral casualty of men in power who are blind to their fate and obsessed by their own?
Will my heart be as affected for Amal as I am affected when my little girl suffers from a bleeding finger? Will I feel the urgency for Amal as I feel for my little girl?
Alas, that’s the understandable part of our self-centredness. But what makes it worse, far worse, is the drive for wealth, for endless accumulation, under the materialist creed.
This changes our self-centredness into something even our loved ones cannot recognise. We always make excuses for the accumulation of wealth, assuring ourselves and others that we are the same person before embracing that creed and will be the same person thereafter.
But the reality, as people like Amal has shown, is that we are not. No doubt the materialist creed rewards industry, risk-taking and perseverance, but what it does not reward is a heart of contentment and peace.
In fact, most of the time, by embracing that creed, we are telling ourselves to never settle, where nothing is ever enough, and our heart becomes a bottomless pit of insatiable appetites.
That is why the Rich Young Ruler walked away as an aspiring believer, and not a living one.
While we may overcome self-centredness after a determined struggle, we are helpless to overcome it when we give ourselves totally to this materialist creed - or, serving two masters. When greed becomes all-consuming, the self becomes all-possessing.
And when the self becomes all-possessing, we lose not only the hope of our salvation, we also lose the heart of being a human. That is where men in power, for self-preservation and enrichment, will fight to the end, bulldozing their way, just to demand for more of what they do not need, engaging in ego-battles they are bent on winning, and sacrificing lives they do not care.
This has been the fate of mankind, from the beginning of time till now. It has also been a vicious cycle of human greed, hatred and arrogance that has elevated the self as worth every effort to prosper at the expense of all other lives that are clearly dispensable.
So, innocent lives like Amal will continue to suffer under this indecisiveness of humanity because her heart seek to be human but her actions betray that ideal for the shiny things of this world. And another term for it is the inauthencity of good intentions for the road to hell is often paved with it. Cheerz.
Ps: Some years back, Professor Steven Pinker wrote a highly persuasive book (700+ pages) hailing a new era of peace in our modern times where the better angels of ourselves are featured more prominently in this value-warped world.
It is a peace founded on the moralised infrastructure of our global institutions that is fundamentally rule-based and driven by an apparently sound liberal ideology of human freedom to express, to choose and to create (to innovate).
It was all going well after WWII under this breezy banner of liberalised values until the economic crash in 2008/9. I will not go on a historical romp to trace the cause(s) of that downfall, but suffice to say that it is one historic downfall where the price tag (of recovery) was picked up by the people and not the culprits because they were essentially “too big to fail.”
Alas, if you look at it holistically, this peace that Prof Pinker is talking about may just be a peace not so much for all, but for the entrenched, elitist interest in our globalised society, and the moralised infrastructure that had evolved after WWII may have been hijacked by them (the 1%) under the surreptitious and unscrupulous cover of humanitarian aid and philanthropy, and the banner of UN Millennium Development Goals.
Now, there is no doubt that the world today as compared to it two hundred years ago is better in every conceivable way - healthcare, infant mortality, transport, technology, science, knowledge, sanitation, creature comforts, and so on.
But the betterment in those aspects does not necessarily bring about a betterment in values (materialist creed), authenticity (our double-mindedness), and hope (look at climate change and our probable eventual doom).
Maybe the difference between then and now is that the bad guys (for want of a better term) are better at exploiting values we hold dear to preserve and perpetuate their power and wealth in society.
What is made more insidious is that the focus tends to be on individuals suffering and how to alleviate that and it stops short at taking the macro-view of looking at how the system as a whole can be changed. Bandage over bullet wound?
Let me sum it up with these words by a Harvard Business School Professor Gautam Mukunda: -
“”The ability of a powerful group to reward those who agree with it and punish those who don’t also distort the marketplace of ideas. This isn’t about corruption - beliefs naturally shift to accord with interests. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.” The result can be an entire society twisted to serve the interests of its most powerful group.””
Food for thoughts?
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