November 18, 2007 |
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Women’s rights are
human rights?
Stephen Henry Lewis,
United Nations’ envoy for HIV AIDS in Africa, 2006, said:
“[Women's rights have] never been made real, and so long as men control the levers and bastions of power… it never will be real. The demeaning diminution of women is everywhere evident… freedom from sexual violence, the right to sexual autonomy, to sexual and reproductive health, social and economic independence, and even the whiff of gender equality are barely approximated. It’s a ghastly, deadly business, this untrammeled oppression of women in so many countries on the planet.”
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Charity Balls Season
Charities Should Not Be Needed
Take The Vatican for instance. Golden domes and gilded robes to rival The Crown Jewels. Properties all over the world worth billions of dollars, including the few priceless acres on which their holy house sits—a sovereign nation beholden to no other governments’ rules and regulations. Yet millions of Catholics live in abject poverty while the church applauds hundreds of thousands of do-gooders who are trying to help the sick, the poor, the young and old.
They claim to be holy and infallible, but where did their wealth come from? Crusades, conquests, and captures of property, possessions, and people. Those they left alive, that is. During the Spaniards expansion of the old world into the new world for their homeland’s throne and royal houses, they made short work of indigenous populations, treasuries, and anything else of value. Ruthlessly entitled to the good fortunes of ‘heathens,’ they justified their crimes as ‘purifying’ their world of humans unworthy to exist.
Families were torn apart, homes and places of learning were destroyed, and innocent people were cut down or run over like stubble in a fallow field. Their blood rode home with the victors via thoroughbred mounts, gilded carriages, and treasure chests loaded with undeserved prizes. The remnants of the decimated societies are mostly women and girls—the able-bodied men having been killed off by the invaders. These are the starving margins the church continues to ignore in today’s slums, ghettos, and impoverished villages.
The religions less infamous for their bloody crusades have left their taint of poverty in many forms and on every continent. The preaching and teaching of platitudes, beatitudes, and false cause have successfully and systemically enslaved the minds, bodies, and wills of the people. Ignorance and greed under the guise of morality kills hundreds of thousands of trusting subjects each year. For instance, the AIDS pandemic fueled by lack of information, denial of protective barriers against sexually transmitted disease, and the sanctioned subjugation of females by the ordained supremacy of males.
AIDS had peaked in 1992 at 30 percent and through intense education had decreased: now 10 percent of the population was infected. The disease had killed off the better part of a generation. It was a nation of two million orphans.
Refer Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux
Gaping Holes in Poor Pockets
Trillions of philanthropic dollars have been poured into the sink-holes of bomb craters, burned-out buildings, and broken down infra-structures. The technological revolution has warped reality into an unidentifiable world of graft, corruption, and modern-day slavery. Yet the givers keep on giving as if they’ll someday be able to make up for all the viciousness perpetrated on the unsuspecting victims of millennia past.
It’s rather ironic, too, that the givers and doers and fixers are mostly women—at least doing the tedious work—while the masculine gender pretends not to see that their brothers are still wasting societies under the guise of globalization banners and economic flags. “A new world order” is being proclaimed, and yet there never was order in the old world from which we thought we’d escaped.
Males never look back, and seldom bother to ask a stranger, “What do you need? How can I help?” Poverty is never their fault—as an individual, as a company employee, as a financier, as a patriot, and especially not as a minister or ‘man of God.’ Rather than behooving his congregants to stop stealing, lying, cheating, raping, mongering, and killing, the collection plate is passed and a portion given to the poor as a token of momentary guilt and/or reluctant compassion. Thanks will be given in next week’s bulletin for all who contributed to the cause.
Why do women continue to spend their lives making up for such despicable patriarchal history, hierarchy, and unwarranted supremacy? Why do we continuously pretend that they are ‘good,’ when their past and current actions could be attributed to such evil as would put Satan to shame? Let the men take care of the widows, the orphans, the sickly honored elders for a change. Let them smell the stench of death escaping from the lips of a starving child. Let their hands be covered in blood and excrement and vomit. Let them experience what the do-gooders witness daily because of the barbaric actions of males in the past and present.
Charities and NGOs were now part of the Malawi economy, surely one of the larger parts. They were troughs into which many people were unsuccessfully trying to insert their snouts. I was not shocked when I later learned that the hotshots who doled out aid in some African countries demanded sex from famine victims in return for the food parcels.
Refer Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux
Auction the Pulpits and Politicos
Charity itself is a way of celebrating the victims of man-made events that never should’ve occurred in the first place. The perpetrators are allowed to slink into the shadows while the victimized receive a few fleeting moments in the spotlight. Even natural disasters that leave millions homeless and hungry are glorified and excused as God’s will, evidently making the aftermath of disasters more tolerable. But there’s never enough in the public coffers to refurbish the lives of the survivors and so they’re conveniently added to the starving margins of charity’s children. Soon, the givers themselves will be added to the numbers while crusading religions and invading governments swell with new converts and recruits.
The so-called holy books with their holy laws, written by men primarily, conveniently instruct converts and believers to give—of their money, their time, their talents, and in some cases, their children—to Government and God. “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God, that which is God’s,” or rather to their representative recipients. This ordered giving most often comes ‘off the top,’ which ensures that the needs of government and religions are met first. The black holes of these star-studded systems suck up the spoils and rapidly solidify their treasures into impenetrable density.
But this was the era of charity in Africa, where the business of philanthropy was paramount, studied as closely as the coffee harvest or a hydroelectric project. Now a complex infrastructure was devoted to what had become ineradicable miseries: famine, displacement, poverty, illiteracy, AIDS, the ravages of war. Name an African problem and an agency or a charity existed to deal with it. But that did not mean a solution was produced. Charities and aid programs seemed to turn African problems into permanent conditions that were bigger and messier.
Refer Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux
Rather than multi-million dollar housing for the holy ones, how much health care could be provided by auctioning property, monuments to men, and hoarded treasures? How about adequate fresh water, food, shelter, and sanitation? Where’s the education and vocational training for both genders? Endless additions to emergency funds and their proper distribution? Instead, millions are spent in campaigning for ineffective morality, prejudices, and other self-serving causes.
Absence of Men in Responsibility
Where are they? Approximately 2.5 million are imprisoned in the United States alone. Millions more are bowing and scraping in military campaigns, celebrating their manhood and bravery by killing or being killed. Millions more are doing absolutely nothing except eating, sleeping, and ‘hanging out.’ Dropping out of school because they can’t or won’t meet requirements of scholastics. Living in separate households because the marriage didn’t fulfill their needs. Tinkering with toys, hobbies, and other physical indulgences that rob their families of necessities, such as their presence. Forever blaming others for their inadequacies while refusing assistance as a sign of weakness.
Sharing is different than charity. Sharing is what one does naturally when sufficiency abounds. Sharing is the opposite of hoarding, attaching, and possessing. Sharing requires no obligations to be rewarded by belonging. Sharing is voluntary. Sharing is a natural order of Universe.
Charity would not be needed at all if men kept their word and did their job of providence, protection, and paternal obligations. Charity is man-made and has rules of engagement. Charity feeds on itself and relies on victims for its very existence. Charity is a trumped-up feel-good tranquilizer for those who have more than those who have none.
…All aid is self-serving, large-scale famines are welcomed as a “growth opportunity,” and the advertising to stimulate donations for charities is little more than “hunger porn.”
Refer Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux
Charity is just a distraction from creating permanent solutions to the larger issue of more than half the world’s population going to bed hungry, getting up hungry, and being hungry throughout the day. Is it really possible to have a “Happy Thanksgiving” if we bother to notice that our global sisters and brothers—the man-made crying, starving margins—are absent from our tables of abundance? I dare say no, but can’t wait to wash my hands, give thanks, and dig in.
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