URGENT MESSAGE TO THE DARKER RACE

Dear humanity,

      Pray for your black brothers. Pray for the darker race, for all to whom your present fate is still strange. Show them the unreachable depths of your pain. Call the numbers aloud, paint a grimmer picture of the figures; tell them the genesis of your current nemesis. Show these countless Thomases how you once brushed aside the news, and went to sleep when the demon first walked in. Tell them how the fake news from a foreign land became the daily bread in your own homes, how the Chinese virus suddenly bore the name of your own beautiful countries. Tell them, please. Sound an alarm to the darker race, not to be at ease in their falling Zions: tell them how it came like a thief in the night, and took over your lands like a flood.

         Tell them it spreads like wildfire and gives blind eyes to ranks and titles. And when you’re done telling, pray for them, for all else has failed at this point. All words, all caution, all sciences and logic have failed. Your predicaments have only moved them to greater heights of laughter and mockery; your woes, to them, are but inspirations for more and more jokes.  They laugh at your pains and frown at your little mirth. They think not the way you do. You are indoors, waiting for the storm to pass; they are outdoors, waiting to be chased with guns and rifles, waiting, I say, like recalcitrant kids, to be forced into safety. Call in the soldiers and they’ll shrink and melt away. Take the gun away and life returns to normalcy.

                You call it a pandemic. They call it a phantom; you call it a virus; they call it a fat, white lie from the pit of hell. You call it a threat to human life, they call it a political gimmick, nothing more, nothing less. You speak of momentary isolation, they speak of something else, something very confusing and confounding: they tell you about food and hustling and mass unpreparedness and the need to dance a little longer to the dying tunes of sanctimonious routines.  You see and speak with caution; they imagine and fantasize and speak aloud with redoubled audacity. They wonder why real men should hide away from the storm, as you once wondered, and got blown away.

             They speak of sanitizers and social distancing and all those nice and lofty things only on paper. In reality, in their streets, in their ever bustling markets, life goes on. You long for a solution, they long for gains and merchandise, and rejoice at this very golden “opportunity” to raise the cost of things and make life more unbearable for one another. You think of some of them and immediately think of Lucifer. But they are not evil. No, they are not worse than you are; and you are not worse than they are. From the same loins you emerged. And if your eyes have opened, theirs can. If you’ve learned from your woeful experience, they too can, not from theirs—for who can afford to wait that long?—but from yours.

        Dear humanity, face your fears, shed your tears, and as you go about burying your countless deads, remember the darker race. And pray for them.

                                                                                                          Still your brother,

                                                                                                                                Udeme Ralph