It is a peculiar thing, watching the news these days. One cannot help but feel the chill of historical cycles. Take the latest from Kenya: a man shot during a protest against a US Ebola quarantine centre.
British aid workers warned. The narrative is depressingly familiar. It is the same old story of the centre and the periphery, of the civilising mission and the barbarian backlash.
We have seen this before. In the Roman provinces, in the Victorian colonies. The pattern holds.
The West, in its decadent decline, still insists on imposing its order. And the periphery, in its chaos, still rejects it. The man shot in Kenya is not just a statistic.
He is a symptom. A symptom of a world order that is fraying at the edges. The quarantine centre is a microcosm: a symbol of Western fear and control.
And the protest is a symbol of something else: the resentment, the anger, the refusal to be managed. British aid workers warned. Of course, they were warned.
They are always warned. But they go anyway. Because that is what the West does.
It goes despite the warnings. It goes because it believes. And that belief, that faith in the mission, is what is killing it.
The Roman legions believed. The Victorian explorers believed. And now the aid workers believe.
But belief does not stop bullets. It does not quell protests. It only creates more martyrs.
More martyrs for the cause of something that none of them can quite articulate. The man shot in Kenya is a footnote. A footnote in a story that has been told a thousand times.
But perhaps, just perhaps, this time the footnote is the story. Because it is in the footnotes that the real history is written. The great empires fall not with a bang but with a whimper.
And the whimper is the sound of a man being shot in a protest against a quarantine centre. It is the sound of British aid workers being warned. It is the sound of us, reading this, feeling a flicker of concern before turning the page.
That flicker is the heartbeat of decline. And it is getting fainter. Rome fell because it stopped caring.
We stopped caring a long time ago. The man in Kenya is dead. The protest will fade.
The centre will open or it won’t. But the cycle continues. And we are all complicit.
Not because we pull triggers, but because we don’t. Because we read and forget. Because we are too busy with our own little lives to see the big one slipping away.
The big one. The empire. The West.
Whatever you want to call it. It is dying. And the man in Kenya is the ghost at the feast.
He is the reminder that the feast is over. The aid workers will leave. The centre will be abandoned.
And Kenya will be left to its own devices, as it always was. But we will move on to the next crisis. The next warning.
The next shot. Because that is what we do. That is what empires do.
They ignore the signs until it is too late. And then they wonder what happened. I could tell you what happened.
It happened in the slow erosion of meaning. In the turning of a page. In the death of a man nobody knew.
That is what happened. And it will happen again. Because it always happens again.
The shot in Kenya is not a breaking story. It is a breaking of the world. And we are all just shards.
