Human Rights For All

Yesterday was a proud day for all those who seek out and aim to right the injustices of this world.

I’d like to say that I’m normally one of those people, seeking out and fighting against oppression, starvation, inhumanity, brutality and unfairness in our world. The truth is I’m just a pretty average guy with a pretty standard life.

The Malawi High Commissioners office in London yesterday saw a gathering in protest at the inhumane and oppressive sentencing of Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, the two Malawian men imprisoned and sentenced to 14 years hard labour. What did they do? They told the world that they loved each other.

I only heard about this because my good friend Chris Morris wrote about this travesty in a moving and thought provoking  blog post.

I’d never been to any kind of protest before and I hadn’t heard anything about this case before either, and in any case, as a heterosexual man, what’s any of this got to do with me?

While I sat in my living room thinking about what might be going on for these two men over in Malawi and how it doesn’t really seem like a fair way to treat other human beings in our world, I started to wonder if there really was a place for me to make some kind of difference. I’d already signed Madonna’s petition in support of equal rights and freedom of love in Malawi but something inside me wasn’t quite adding up.

The more I thought about it, the more I started to realise that it really didn’t matter what I did, as long as I made the choice to do something.

I think there’s usually two main thoughts that an average guy like me has when hearing about something bad happening elsewhere in the world:

The first being “What on earth can I do about it” and the second being “It’ll be OK, someone else will do something about this”. This was where I decided to do something different this time. The fact was that these men could die and only by changing that would anything actually be different. I couldn’t fly over there and break them out of jail, but the simple act of turning up to a protest of which I knew nothing about just seemed like the right thing to do.

To be honest, I didn’t think that my role in this protest would actually make any impact on the world, after all, I’m just one person joining an already passionate crowd of people…but I was determined that I was going to be there even if in some moral way it made some difference to something or someone somewhere.

When I arrived I was pleasantly surprised. What I expected to find wasn’t what was really happening. My expectation of a hard-line crowd that knew everything about these two men and their case was delightfully challenged. About 200 people turned up and among them were some pretty experienced protesters who knew the chants, the rhymes and all about the cause but they weren’t the only people. There were other people like me! People who just wanted to make some kind of difference and make a choice to turn up and show their support in what ever capacity they could and for whatever difference it might make.

The irony is, the more of these people that turn up to these kinds of things and the more support and attention we all show towards the things we feel aren’t right in this world…the more of a difference it makes when we do turn up.

We might just be individual people. We might not know all the ins and outs of each case. We might not be used to creating change on a grand scale. But what we do have is ourselves and our own way of knowing when something is right and when something is just plainly wrong in our world.

We have the ability to make decisions that, on a single scale, make only the tiniest of dents in the bigger machine of injustice. But together, all of those dents, all of those decisions, all of our attention combined towards a common purpose…can create change on an unimaginable scale.

Less that two hours after the protest ended yesterday, Malawi’s president, Bingu wa Mutharika, officially pardoned the couple ‘on humanitarian grounds’ and called for their immediate and unconditional release.

I was just one person that day turning up to a protest I didn’t really know very much about for a case I didn’t really know much about in an area of London I didn’t know very much about.

What I did know was that I didn’t want these humans to suffer anymore. What I did know was that I needed to do something. And what I do know, is that every person that makes a choice to do something, changes the world forever.