Thinking about security on the 20th anniversary of the Genocide in Rwanda

I wrote a short post from Cuba on Monday about something so fundamental to our ability to live and plan beyond the moment: our most basic dependence on security. But my internet card must have run out before I finished, so I'm adding my two cents late.

Monday was the international commemoration of the genocide in Rwanda, which started 20 years ago. The well known facts center around a mass and very brutal murder of Tutsis over a 100-day period-- somewhere from 500,000 to 1 million people, men, women and children, according to Wikipedia; numbers are not confirmed.

Propaganda definitely preemted and accompanied the genocide, but the sheer brutality and speed of the mass murders were shocking. Most of them were perpetrated hand-to-hand, and stand as disturbing and very contemporary testament to the possibility of completely shutting down any sense of human empathy.

A lot has been written and said on genocide by some incredible people whom I have had the honor of knowing a little, and it seems like there is still much more to understand and come to terms with even today.

My objective with this post is to remind myself how very lucky I am to live in a country where that fundamental security is in place, and how that shoud not be taken for granted and is still not a given in many parts of the world.

What are the hallmarks of the sort of security I mean here? I'm not talking of living free from crime, or personal tragedies, or even stock market fluctuation - all of which can be personally momentous in the worst ways. I mean a more overarching societal security - the relative confidence that there is no war, the individual bad behavior may be unjustly handled, but mass violent crime will be dealt with severely, and that even non-violent crime, though it may persist for a time, will ultimately, on one real day that we are likely to see, be subject to a more just reckoning.

In Cuba, we heard about how most people don't put money in banks. What if there is political change? No one knows what would happen next. What if withdrawals would be limited to a small minimum per day, if inflation happened and currency were devalued, or if fund were taxed massively from one day to the next or even nationalized? On a less existential level, this economic uncertainty also creates very fundamental insecurities that can paralyze action.

It's true that even with a great deal of lived security, I have inherited some collective sense of fear. Perhaps everything is different from how it looks after all, maybe the stability I feel will still prove itself a mirage. Rabid Antisemitism, a meteor, food insecurity- things could change. Or ruining the environment for good- that's a very realistic one. It's hard not to notice the many recent popular films thematize these underlying catastrophic possibilities because they play to our deepest fears.

But the fact is that I've lived 40 years with this fundamental security already and that there are no signs I can divine now of radical departure, even if we allow that the future is, by definition, always open....

Maybe what I am really writing about is not truly a fundamental societal security- perhaps that is putting the bar too high. But a security great enough to create inner peace that enables a person to focus on any and all other things to be accomplished. I'm grateful for that.