A mentally unstable white boy shoots up a class full of kindergartners and all they will talk about is introducing more Christian doctrine into schools and educational systems because “God” and “morality” will prevent people from picking up guns and shooting innocent people. A black boy of the same age, cranks up the volume in a parking lot in his new car celebrating his 16th birthday and immediately becomes the object of suspicion.
Many miles away, a woman is gang raped in a moving bus belonging to a well known bus contractor, one of the few who render their services to schools in the capital city of a country that’s the second biggest market globally for practically every industry and all they will talk about is punishing the rapist and how men are inherently stupid.
Hang the rapist they say. I say okay. Chemical Castration they say. Okay. Death to him! Okay. The victim is still, for the lack of better wording, royally screwed. No talk about rehabilitation, little talk about preventive measures, little or no talk about societal construct, how it takes generations and hundreds of years for humans to accept and change the way they think. No talk about how to make things change faster. And of course people forget about the guy that tried to protect that girl and was almost bludgeoned to death. It takes years for people to accept ideas radically different than theirs...radically different than what they've been brought up to believe in, whether it is an imaginary old man who’s got your back while ignoring an entire continent or a race, or whether it’s one sex being superior to another.
If it took centuries for most people to accept that the Earth is not flat, but round and that it does indeed revolve around the Sun, and that there are billions of similar complex systems that make the universe what it is, and that we are nothing but a bag of meat on a speck of dust with no real purpose while being the result of a series of cosmic ‘accidents’, how do you expect a group of boys who grow up seeing their mother dutifully conceding to every whim and fancy of their drunken idiot of a father,being forced to respect that shit hole of a union, while being brought up to believe they’re horses on steroids, being segregated from women from when they’re born, to not rape a woman because she seems “full of it” or “she was asking for it” because of “the way she was looking at me”...”why would she smile and look at me that way? Why would she waste my time?” "That'll show them" No talk about rape being a power tool. Pissed off with him? Rape his sister. Individuals do it, groups do it, heck even armies do it.Men are impaled, women are raped on a daily basis. It sends a clear message: We are in control, you are not. Power struggles could be between two classes, castes, communities, countries, or religions even species.
It’s the same lines every time. It’s like a romantic comedy; the plot is invariably always the same, just different faces, different places, different papers, different reporters, different politicians, a different ‘us’.
Then there’s the townsfolk, the moneyed ones who live in big cities with tall buildings and have the shortest of tempers, the most isolated and depressing personal lives...people who come from backgrounds of privilege.....who think their way of life is civilization. They’re amusing because they debate, they talk, and they have this illusion of happiness....they believe that a better car, a better spouse, true love, wearing better clothes and judging others’ is what being happy is all about. They value their career more than their life and it defines them, the kind of people they meet and greet or eat with. They're also emotionally vulnerable, sensitive and prey to people who think from their head and not from their heart.
You ask the ones who have less they’ll defend themselves and or rationalize by saying “Oh the money doesn't matter” “This kind of work seldom pays well, but it’s what I like doing “Aah well that’s life” “It’s God’s will” ““All up to the big guy up there”.
You ask the ones who have more “I didn't take a single day off in my twenties” “I worked hard to get here” “The government still takes 40% of my earnings...and keeps half of it for themselves, the bastards! ” “I was lucky” “It’s all up to the big guy up there”
The fact is ladies and gentlemen, that we human beings have conditioned ourselves to be ashamed of our bodies, our sexuality, our urges, and our instincts, our natural born curiosity about things, states of mind and consciousness and our feelings...some of which might be uncomfortable. We are taught to cover ourselves with clothing, cut our hair or keep it long, keep sex confined to the bedroom, behind closed doors and not talk about it, or the feelings of attachment that come with it because it’s indecent while we cheer our young men on while they burn another group of people to ashes. “Homosexuality is unnatural, it’s a disease...so what if all animals have the twisted ones, why should we, we can reason”
“We respect women....hence from now on we devote an entire coach of every train to women only, as further segregation will make it easier for male passengers to understand that women are just as capable as they are.” “Please give your seat to women, children, senior citizens and to those in need”. Hey mr. guy without a leg, you are just as capable as a woman. Four year old kid, you're just as capable as a woman, old man who can’t stand up for long because he gets tired, you're just as capable as a woman my friend.
We keep dogs and cats as pets and criticize the ones who eat them for dinner in other parts of the world, whose culture we do not understand, while happily biting in to what used to be a calf or a cow, or a pig, or a goat or a bird of some sort. We criticize those who don’t eat other animals, and they criticize us who do.
We routinely send our children to single sex schools when mountains of research demonstrate a positive correlation between single sex school environments and unsuccessful relationships.“But tell me something, how does keeping a child segregated during his or her formative year’s right through physical, mental and sexual development have any impact on his or her personality or how they deal with each other?” But assumptions about fostering homosexuality is largely prevalent.
We subscribe to rituals, mostly religious that have outlived their purpose, we buy into the philosophy that all religions bring peace while conveniently ignoring the wars throughout history some which continue to take countless lives all because our parents couldn't be wrong. Our teachers couldn't be wrong. Our heroes couldn't be wrong. They couldn't be wrong about something as big and important as the meaning of life and what happens after we die, hey no way.
The ones that we elect to protect us rampantly and routinely fail us and continue to provide us with quality entertainment on the seven o clock news. They choose to spend a huge amount of time, energy and resources on getting into people’s houses and incarcerating them for smoking plants that grow naturally and that too without a warrant(it’s not necessary) while waiting to show reasonable cause before a judge to knock on a murderer/arsonist/rapist’s door to let him get out on bail and enjoy a beverage made from fermented grain which is a very natural process while he relieves himself in a ceramic pot within concrete walls within the same space within which he will eat and sleep, which is also natural..or is it?
All of these incidents ladies and gentlemen(because ladies don’t need to be gentle, they always are obviously) reflect a larger picture that goes beyond rapes, murders, drugs, violence, abuse, discrimination and all of that stuff that’s been going on since history began. It is the simple fact that a human being is an insignificant drop of water in a vast ocean of collective consciousness which is largely very irrational,emotional, selfish, scared, daft and doomed for extinction.
Unless of course, children are brought up to believe that they’re not special but just as good as anyone out there. Unless of course, the coming generations are encouraged to explore and constantly question every single action that they will be doing until they reach the final conclusion which is, that the only meaning that life has, is to appreciate the beauty that exists and do what makes them come alive, as long as it doesn't harm another being...and that there will always be suffering. Unless they’re taught that all humans are offensive, obnoxious and disappointing and whatever they say will at some point make their blood boil and that it’d be a waste of energy to ponder over that moment and they rather put it in to what they liked doing, we're fucked as a race ladies and gentlemen. Sorry to break it to you...not.
Because as I see it, unless that happens, it doesn't matter whether a white boy picks up a book and chooses not to shoot kids, teachers and students, because halfway across the world a brown boy who has nothing to lose but his childhood and of course his entire life will pick up a similar book and justify bombing that white boy’s home while drawing hatred from another brown boy who lives across the valley and believes that chanting a few ancient lines and smearing red dust on his newly wedded wife’s forehead gives him ownership rights over her entire body and soul... while his ‘yellow’ godless neighbor eyes her enviously...and who knows one day will be pissed off enough to rape her to send a message to him.
And then, well we're at war again.
“Why? Because fuck you that’s why.”
"The future will soon be a thing of the past. The planet is fine. The people are fucked."
- George Carlin.
" We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene. "
-Colonel Walter E Kurtz (Apocalypse now 1979)
"I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't. Though it's a horrible experience, it's not as if violence hasn't affected many of us." “You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”
― Alice Sebold
"Few know that soldiers impaled babies on bayonets
and tossed them still alive into pots of boiling
water.They gang-raped women from the ages of twelve to eighty and then killed them.I beheaded people, starved them to death, burned them,and buried them alive, over two hundred in all. It is terrible that I could turn into an animal and do these things. There are really no words to explain what I was doing. I truly became a devil. "
-Hakudo Nagatomi, quoted in Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II "
