Siet

Here I am, listening to a Thievery Corporation, a Washington downtempo movement, remix of Satyam Shivam Sundaram, eating a plate of shu mai and har gow and Canadian-maple glazed breakfast sausages, using a pair of chopsticks that look like those at Soeul Soul yesterday, and drinking a can of Americanised Arizona green tea that sits near my packets of Tandoori naan that I long to flash in a stir-fry wok in canola oil.

What’s so beautiful about this picture? It’s colourful.

It was only for the full 20 years of my life that such beautiful pictures were painted ever-so slowly, all so careful to place the right colours in the right places. It’s not quite avant-garde as it had been only 15 years ago, where non-Christian children would cite prayers they knew nothing about and the playground was a scattered palette – all of these paints so beautifully set up for the peinture. All it took was one paintbrush to uplift the entropy, filling the mezcla of hopes and dreams on a single, figurative vue panoramique.

Inarguably, this picture is imperfect. It describes humanity so well, and that’s what makes it liang. It’s the state of life as it should have been since the beginning. It’s an understatement when I say it’s a huge disappointment that such mixing only started more than 2000 years of human existence. This was far too overdue and far too late. We could have probably saved so much grief and unsettling deaths had we been less stubborn with our desire to abase ourselves. How foolish. No lo quiero oír.

So let me ask you this, for those that belittle my view: how feasible would attending an art museum of blank white sheets? Would you be impressed by the author’s innovation and creativity? What if I told you their names? Their background? Maybe I’ll add their ethnicity – after all, that seems to be the most important factor of the drawing.

Let’s face it, human. A white page costs you 8 cents at Campus Copy. If I could change my name to Gus and stick a white page at AGO and become famous, I would have done that so many years ago. Sadly, my eyes, smeared with what I was told to be as an “ugly” flick of a paintbrush, say otherwise.

Why did us, as humans, have to think of something so discriminatory and acerbic throughout our ancestry? Since when has it ever been necessary in the progression of civilisation? Do we somehow speed up the discovery of an oncological panacea by pointing our noses against those with skin darker than ours? Do we spew our acidity onto those with wind-scarred eyes so we can prove an invalid point? Do we deliberately put a road-block in front of a wheel-chair pitch for some sort of protection against ourselves? What necessitates this sinful behaviour? Does our testosterone levels really gauge our academic, commercial, brute or artistic strength?

Don’t get me wrong – I’m no religion junkie, but I would might as well commit a sin if I were to belittle my brothers and sisters, pulling the rug under their comfortable toes or ripping an orchard from their roots when they could easily provide us the fruit of knowledge and power if we lived symbiotically.

Luckily, our society and generations can be the palette of the greater picture. We should not turn to a greater power to find peace – we should be looking forward, eyes wide open, into the eyes of your comrades, whether or not their skin deflects or absorbs light; whether or not their brains may think differently than yours; whether or not they do believe in God, the dear Scholar, Allah, Shivam, “they who sleep in your soul”, the dream, Gaia, “the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”, the king of Chaos or the atoms and molecules.

March forward fortissimo, human, and they will follow. Only those that listen can hear, only those that can hear can tell, and only those that tell can make a difference. The world is waiting for your lecture – knock them all cold in their tracks.