No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main. – John Donne
2.6 million children die from hunger each year.
2,800 people have succumbed to Ebola, with another 5,800 fighting for their lives.
300 people die as a ferry sinks off the coast of Taiwan.
…
Sam is a fifteen year old boy, mixed three parts African descent, half part Spanish and the remainder a mongrel’s mix of other races due to generations of cross-cultural marriages.
His day starts off getting up at four a.m., rummaging through a beat-up refrigerator for left-overs of yesterday’s dinner to make into sandwiches for his two younger brothers. He slaps two pieces of stale bread over his creation, boxes them and leaves for his morning paper route. His thread bare scarf offers little protection against the biting wind that assails from every direction. It easily passes through his patched-up jacket, obtained from Mr. Jacksons’ garage sale. What a find he had made that day wasn’t it? The surprise on his face when he found the jacket lying at the bottom of a pile of broken items, not too worse for wear, with half as many holes as Swiss cheese – those could be covered, he tells himself.
His breath is ragged as he jogs around the neighbourhood, lamp lights poorly illuminating the area, half-revealing dirty streets, gutters clogged with all sorts of bottles, newspapers and general waste. His deliveries done, he returns home at five a.m. Just in time to wake his brothers up, he pushes and prods them out of their beds, into their uniforms and out of the house, stopping just long enough to take the sandwiches he prepared earlier. Sam has enough for just two people, he decides to beg for his own lunch in the canteen later.
His father used to be a cab driver, co-sharing the cab with another person, let’s call him Tom, who dealt with the unscrupulous types on occasion. Long story short, a tragic mix up involving the driver of the cab left his father paralyzed on one side and hindered many essential brain functions, leaving behind a vegetable, barely able to string together two words. Of course, the police came up with no leads and the insurance pay-out was barely enough to see him through the hospitalisation and recovery operation.
The mother you ask? Always out of the home and only back some nights, and ungodly hours at that, drunk as a hippy pilgrimage. As early back as Sam could remember, this was her usual routine. Just a guest of the living-room couch, a stranger lurched over the lip of their toilet bowl.
This is just one family but they feel as real as you and I do.
Theirs is just one sad story of millions but except, humanized. Or coming from the other spectrum, everything else has been dehumanized.
We choose what we want to hear thus we hear what we choose.
We isolate ourselves from everything, dehumanising everyone. Nothing gets to us, tucked away on our islands, statistics are just numbers to be read, kept away to be brought up in small talk while idling by the water cooler. It resonates once we start giving people identities, feelings hopes, dreams, aspirations, frustrations, worries, despair.
It scares us, reminds us of our mortality; reminds us that we are not the only ones living in this world, that there are worse horrors than a botched meeting, a romantic rejection, a lost belonging.
We are all islands.
We cannot hope to be anything more. The truth awaits, circling us like the endless ocean, creeping up our shores as the day progresses. We skip back towards safety, towards the centre of our islands, all covered up, snug, sound in our beds as the night passes. The moon waxes and wanes, pulling the tide back out to sea. A new day arrives, we go down to the edges of our islands; a bottle washes up. It’s from our neighbour, he sends his regards and asks about pleasant things, we take care not to wade out too far.
For the truth will consume us, making us feel vulnerable, or it might not.
Either way, we settle for brief moments of interconnectedness between our islands, everything else is noise.
Every man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is his own continent,
Apart from the main.
