The Grammy Awards in the United States honor achievements in music, and the annual ceremonies usually stand out for the tributes and performances.
This year’s event held Sunday contained these same ingredients – but with one notable addition: the appearance of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who delivered a short but impassioned message on behalf of his people.
Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, and while there have been talks regarding the crisis, the Ukrainian people continue to suffer as a result of the violence and the invasion.
Zelensky, himself a former actor, said the musicians in his country have traded their tuxedos for body armor.
“They sing to the wounded in hospitals. Even to those who can’t hear them,” Zelensky said.
The silence brought by ruin and death, he said, was the opposite of music. More than 140 children have died and another 400 have been wounded.
Those in bomb shelters wake up, happy for merely being alive.
Zelensky exhorted the attendees to the event – and their global audience – to fill the silence with their music. “Fill it today to tell our story. Tell the truth about this war on your social networks, on TV. Support us, in any way you can. Any—but not silence. And then peace will come.”
The message rings true both for the suffering Ukrainians, as Zelensky intended, but also for all other suffering people in many parts of the world.
The real state of events may be masked by the absence of communication infrastructure, by the proliferation of fake news, or by the silence of those complicit in the injustice and who would stand to lose the benefits of the status quo.
For instance, those who stand to gain from the invasion of Ukraine will try to hide the actual damage inflicted on innocent civilians and present the issue as a clash between two equal, warring states.
Those who know what is really happening, meanwhile, have the moral obligation to tell the world and seek help from the international community in quelling the invader’s intentions.
Here at home, with Filipinos in the last month of the campaigning, silence comes in the form of simply accepting narratives told with much conviction but without proof. It is mindlessly going with what seems to be popular sentiment without the benefit of critical thinking, or even common sense.
Complicity is getting swept up in noisy – but empty – motherhood statements, or lionizing individuals for their last names instead of their own documented achievements and expertise.
We should counter these, as well, not only with making music, but speaking up in civilized, substantial discourse founded on the truth and nothing else.
We should eschew behavior that could cause deaths and injuries, literal and figurative ones, among our people, and to the soul of our nation.