Twenty-Twenty Vision: My response to my place of privilege
There is a scene in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight,” where Bruce Wayne rages into a club in the grimy city underbelly. He barges in, fuming over being deprived a chance to avenge the death of his parents, and he encounters the face of Gotham’s organized crime syndicate. He stares into the journeyed eyes of Carmine Falcone. The conversation they had, like many other moments from the entire trilogy, is one that left a lasting memory with me. Falcone told Bruce that he had no clue what the desperation of the people of Gotham felt like. And in that singular statement, he had shown the vastness of the deep chasm between Wayne’s world and the one in which he was trying to understand. That is, in my opinion, a point in the synopsis of the tribulations trying my country.
Nigeria harbors a deep level of animosity constantly brewing between people from different worlds: the young and the old; the aristocrat and the commoner; the north and the south; the believers and the followers of different faiths. Nigeria is like Gotham, I suppose, in the way that both inhabitants clash, wreck and slowly sink each other into a place of degradation. It happens all the time, in recent days even more so than ever because of a firm fixation in preconceived notions and beliefs of the other group.
It occurs to me that, because of this, many people see life through black and white lenses. We see the tipping of the scales as a never-ending battle between good and evil, benevolence and malice, friend or foe. It is a way of looking at the world that I believe to be blurred, because the complexities of life, the seemingly endless voyages through the roaring tempests we all encounter, do not make most situations so easy to place into a designated, labeled box. To some extent, we are all products of the circumstances we are presented with on a day-to-day basis. The other component that morphs us into what we are is how we respond to them. So it is, therefore, a simultaneous act of seeing the best in others, and taking personal responsibility for what we can control.
An intentional sense of empathy is not an extra feature in the traits of a few people. It should be a necessity in all corners of humanity.
So while I appreciate my privilege, I do not take it for granted. While I see others in different places in life, I do not judge and while I see others who see things differently, I listen not to argue, but to understand.
