Politics and Humanity

Qamrul A. Khanson

Politics is the administration of people in order to achieve relative calm during the governance. It is important to understand the psychology as well as the symptoms of problems affecting people in a domain so that the best common interests are combined as a policy to manage political matters. We may also correctly say that Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art of running governmental or state affairs, including behaviour within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the corporate, academic, and religious segments of society. It consists of "social relations involving authority or power" and refers to the regulation of public affairs within a political unit, and to the methods and tactics used to formulate and apply policy.

Humanity is our benevolence in dealing with the children of Adam and Eve (PBUT) with equal values, giving dignity, equal human rights, accepting diversities in culture, language, and colour and giving equal opportunities to human species. The progressive definition of humanity shall be to struggle against evils of the society and adopt righteousness in every sphere of our lives internally and externally.

Politics is the tool to manage people in the best humanistic manner satisfying most of the people and tolerating the opposing minority with full understanding and support. I want to believe that "loving" and "caring" will heal the human divide. Such should be the relationship between the politics and humanity. Unfortunately, beautiful and even luxuriating, present day politicians love is strangely aimed toward inequality, despite our best intentions.

Where is our sense of compassion in this time of fading empathy? Unfortunately, compassion has become redolent of sentimentality. To be compassionate is to seem trite. But compassion exists in the outer reaches of empathy. If empathy is identification with someone's suffering, compassion is imagining oneself in the circumstances that produce someone's suffering. For most of us, it is difficult to extend empathy into compassion; our empathy mostly resides in our homes and with loved ones. Empathy must be transformed into compassion so that even if you can't identify, you can still empathize with their suffering.

People all over the world are suffering and dying due to wrong politics and lack of humanity. The hot spots of the world are Palestine, Kashmir, Somalia, Rwanda, Nigeria, and many other nations where people are in violent disputes against each other within a nation, community and tribes.  Even as Americans are cajoled into becoming inhuman by wrong political agendas, empathy and even compassion surely find niches in which to flourish. But I am finding it more and more difficult to hold open that possibility in a world of rapidly closing doors. It seems that we are all waiting for the clink of the deadbolt in hotspots of the world conflicts where politics are paving the way for inhuman solutions as we have already seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. With tragedies against tragedies supported by politics vengeance, the question is Will we have enough time to become human?

The Goal of every human shall be to settle the matters through the politics of intellectual inculcation, wisdom, equality, opportunities for all and freedom to express and practice for every human. Violence shall be the last resort to manage and apprehend for the justice which is agreed upon.

Toronto

February 25 2012