Let There Be Light 💡

It is difficult to know how to properly manage our resources, these days. It’s hard to see clearly, in the gathering dark. And the air is filled with smoke from wood fires, as it was in the days of our ancestors.

It’s hard to fact check, with the rush and swirl of incoming and often contradictory information and bulletins and opinions. But earlier today I thought I saw flickering on my intermittent screen display a piece of incomprehensible news: it is proposed that the country save electricity by switching off the street lights that illuminate the streets on which our citizens walk.

I have attempted to digest a lot of hard to chew data lately, with pandemic statistics and beauty queen dramas and the ill timed opening of pleasure domes, the creative redistribution of portfolios and accounts and accountabilities - but this really takes the last piece of love cake.

I will check this fact, but it seems to me that the installation of street lights in urbanized areas was one of the great benefits of industrialization. Citizens could feel safe and protected, as they went about their business, returning from work and essential grocery shopping after dark. This was particularly so for women, always more vulnerable to predators, thugs, and other lawless elements of society.

Sri Lanka is noticeably nineteenth century in many ways, particularly where its legal processes and social mores are concerned, but this removal even temporarily of the citizens’ right to illumination and safe conduct after dark in their own streets sets us back into an era before the harnessing of electricity.

In a socialist democracy, the citizens surely have a right to expect safety and protection, and they are entitled to consider that their elected rulers should place their welfare in a position of priority. How can we see what is happening, in our streets, lanes, suburbs and precincts, when there is no light? How can CCTV cameras show any footage without street lights to reveal the identity of robbers and thieves, who attempt to scale the perimeter walls?

It seems as if those rights - far from being inalienable - have been cumulatively eroded; and ideals which were considered foundational structures of the country have been whiteanted away over time, leaving only a facade which can easily be overturned by a breath of ill wind.

What a colossal waste.

What a crying shame.

That a once resplendent land, which its citizens were proud to inhabit, is currently so shadowed that our future path, let alone our progress, is impossible to foresee.