I am Sunčica. I am a human.
Once a five year old boy asked me: “Sunčica, what is murder?” A minute of silence. People say
silence means agreement, but is it always that way? Is there always an answer? Is an unanswered
question always answered in agreement? Is an untried crime a forgotten one? Does ignoring a
problem make it disappear? Where does a problem start and what is it really? Is it something long
forgotten that suddenly knocks on our door like an unwanted guest that never leaves? Never, or is
that just what we think? Looking for an answer for the five year old boy with blue eyes and pallid
skin, I found my thoughts were wandering far away.
In today’s world, full of violence and conflict, we’re often served the word murder on a silver platter.
Be it breakfast, lunch, or dinner, murder is currently a quite attractive occurrence. We hear about,
watch, and unknowingly witness murders which are now so high in numbers that they will soon
become something without which the paradoxical phenomenon we call life, cannot go on. Of course,
in the animal kingdom it cannot, but with human reason..? Hm, let’s try to justify ourselves as we are
holy, elevated beings that do no wrong, aren't we? Before arguing about our purity, let’s define what
murder is exactly. Murder isn't just pulling the plug and selfishly taking away someone's pulse.
Murder is a lot of things. To murder someone doesn't just mean to kill them. To murder someone is
to inflict a sharp pain that slows their pulse, permanently or otherwise. To take away one's home,
language, freedom, and thoughts is to kill someone. To brutally and selfishly take something away,
rip it out of their hands and force them to forever forget. A man that is not free is a murdered man. A
man that is not free is a prisoner, a slave to the thoughts that have been forced upon him, of
unforeseen occurrences, guided by the thought that he must follow the majority, ignoring his
opinion, blindly following his suzerain. A murdered man has been deprived of his right to think and
act, of the right to a deep, serene dream, guided by clean, white hands. Many would correct me for
white is not a color, it is light, but wouldn’t it be fair to give white the right to fight for its constitutive
position? Oh, but we also have black, seen as darkness, the absence of light, forever damned and
cast away because of man’s constant and obsessive need to label. What would happen if we
privileged those colors and labeled them as primary colors, as red, yellow, and blue are? Black and
white are contrasting colors, darkness and light. White, synonymous with life, black, with death.
Those are the two things none of us can avoid. We’re all born and we all die, and we can’t avoid it.
No matter who we are, we all have the same fate. It doesn’t matter if you’re presidents or peasants,
murderers or murdered. The only thing that sets us apart is our afterlife, where we’ll be tired and
punished for our earthly actions. So why judge and discriminate? Why divide those two colors, when
we can mix them all together and live in a harmonious coexistence of different shades of the
rainbow? We’re all a shade, each of us is important to picture, but unimportant to a small piece of it.
Let’s look at the whole picture, not just a piece, because sometimes shades can change their roles. I
am Sunčica. I am an activist, an anarchist, and I think it’s time we realize that those words aren’t
synonyms, they’re antonyms. I am Sunčica and I don’t discriminate between colors. I am Sunčica, I
don’t murder, but I am murdered. I am a sixteen year old girl and I refuse to live in a cruel world, I
refuse to play this cruel game, and follow someone’s cruel rules. I refuse because I know better.
I am Sunčica, I am a human.