the green chair by tj worthington
Every day the news tells about the girl in India tossed aside after multiple rapes. We in the west used to think of India as the place of spirituality, land of gurus and spiritual advancement. Indians came to America for money; Americans went to India for spirituality. Now India is a high-tech capital of the world; computers, multi-millionaires, phone centers. It's been a joke for a long time that our robo-corporate phone calls have an Indian accent at the other end. It's really bad calling for a walk-through on a computer problem with the other end barely speaking English. I ask them how to spell what they're saying often. The shrinking world. All the time the world outside the immediate world of my life shrinks, the further I shrink into my own world of the people I live among to interact with. The more we're told what's real is outside ourselves (on tv), anyplace but where we are, the more I find what's real closer to home in my immediate surroundings and inside myself. In my earlier years, I believed what was real was "out there," and by now have come to find it "in here," within. India's status as a holy land seems like it would be a gentle, nice place where everybody was happy. Not so. It seems the higher a place is in the spiritual scale, the more inclusive the place is of human behavior from the best to the worst and all in between.
While India is the home of Mahatma Gandhi, every religion in the world, holy men galore, it has frauds galore too, even worse than our television evangelists. A place that has several super holy men, masters of the way of the spirit, will have the balance of the same degree of unholy people. We only want to hear about India the land of painted elephants, quaint and old-fashioned by centuries and millennia, instead of years and decades, not a gang of street thugs raping and killing young women. This isn't the first. Poverty is out of this world in India. Poverty is what India is known for before the computer age, and the Ganges, the holiest river in the world, and the nastiest. It's water is healing to the faithful. I'd hesitate to step into the Ganges as I'd hesitate to walk on hot coals. I'd say it would be less unhealthy than stepping into the Mississippi, opaque brown and full of chemical runoff from America's farm land, Monsanto, a name as dreadful as Halliburton. Lots of American sweatshops in India. Poverty is the home of crime. Professional thieves that would make Americans quake at the thought of their skills. Our thieves are straight-forward with guns. In India, they slip around and creep up on their target. I heard the thugs that raped and killed the girl used a 4 foot steel rod to hit her with.
You think American prisons are bad? Don't even think about an Indian prison. Those guys they arrested are suffering. If they're not executed, they'll suffer the rest of their lives, every day. Indian warriors can be among the fiercest in the world. Bernie Madoff died and went to heaven compared to what he'd be enduring in an Indian prison. Mountain roads in India have old-timey bandits that would slit your throat with no more tug on a conscience than peeling an orange. India is also having a breakdown in civility like we in the west are having. Too much change too fast, overwhelming poverty, the introduction of a belief system that money as an end in itself. From traditional life in India, Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim, to the modern world is an even greater leap than the leap from traditional American country ways to the modern world. It's looking like India is on the rise in the turning of the wheel of fortune at the same time USA is on the downward slope. In India's case, it looks like the momentum of building a nation is behind the upward movement. In our case, it's American ignorance that created our artificial downward turn. I say artificial, because it was created. It did not occur naturally. We've been on the downward side since the corporate coup in 1963.
In India it takes a woman to be violated unto death, in Afghanistan a woman shot in the head, both of them women wanting education and working on their educations, to draw attention to an attitude of men toward women that is dangerous to women. Misogyny is commonplace around the world of men. Anger at mother and fear of sexuality, religion and false morality, inability to see it in self, project it onto whore, bitch, deserves it, nothing but a whore. Take that bitch! I don't know how women survive men. Some don't. If I were a woman in this world, I'd have to be a lesbian martial artist with a permit to carry a concealed weapon. White man didn't come out of this last election cycle looking too good. And women don't have it any better here when it comes to morality at the hands of twisted men. It goes on here so much it's boring to the news. Also, bullies only pick on defenseless targets. Bullies are the terrorists of school, sanctioned by teachers and administration by not stopping them. Bullies in society pick on the weak because they're easy. Bullies tend to confine their madness for dominance to home. A guy I know lived with his mother's second husband who beat his mama bad and often, until one day at age fifteen, son told mama's husband, "You hit my mama one more time, I'll kill you with my bare hands." No more covering bruises with makeup for mama.
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