Watch Rustin, if you want to feel inspired in despair again.
Rustin a 2023 movie whose executive producers were non other than the Obamas- Barak and Michelle.
It’s about Bayard Rustin, advisor to Martin Luther King Jr, who dedicates his life to the quest for racial equality, human rights and worldwide democracy.
Managing odds both personal and in public life. Inspite of being constantly targeted for being openly gay in America at the time when homosexuality was still a taboo, Rustin managed to organise the biggest and peaceful the March on Washington in 1963 for civil rights and equality . This event is considered one of the high points of the civil rights movement in the United States. Over 200,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. and called for an end to racial discrimination in the USA. Martin Luther King gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the event. However, as an openly gay Black man, he is all but erased from the civil rights movement he helped build.
I caught the movie today, months after its official release in theatres and also on Netflix but I feel there couldn’t have been a more opportune time.
I can only wish, there is a similar movement to end decades of oppression which has now culminated into an open genocide in Palestine. A movement to ensure “all people matter”.
I can only wish and pray, people come
together and say starvation cannot be used as a weapon. I can only wish and pray, people irrespective of colour, creed, religion, region seek end to the genocide which has in more than six months has killed more than 30,000 people in Gaza including 15,000 children and a much higher number wounded.
While Israel claims the numbers are exaggerated , a Time Magazine article based on two studies published in Lancet showed how the numbers are credible. Most of the dead are woman and children so are the injured. We as humans need to come together to protest this criminality-those dying every day are not just Muslims, they are humans.