The Little House Not On The Prairie

Case studies

One of the workshops in today's Global Concerns session was on Religion and AIDS. The students who organised it made a short presentation of the topic and then divided us into groups and presented us with different hypothetical cases for us to discuss. The groups were as diverse as possible, the idea being that we would be coming to these issues from different religious and cultural backgrounds.

The first case was as follows: You're about to get married with a girl. Before you do, however, she's raped by her uncle, who infects her with HIV. What do you do?

The first to speak was Allen, from S., who said he'd quit her immediately, as the rape showed that her family was not a good one. Then Albert, from N., said that this was a topic the answer for which much depended on where one was in the world. In countries with some resources, for instance, the HIV medicines available are so good at diminishing the virus' count in the blood that one may have sex and conceive children with an infected person, without the virus being transmitted to neither the fetus nor the partner. Safar, from P., said she would not shove the woman aside, but would continue to be a close friend and support her, but that the health situation would mean that marriage was out of the question.

In the second case the situation was similar: a committed couple, with one of its members having infective sex with someone else. This time the action had been voluntary, an incidental fling with an unknown person who turned out to be a carrier.

In this instance everybody in the group was very quick to point out that HIV wasn't nearly as central an issue as betrayal. Most agreed that they would break up the romantic aspect of the relationship, but that they would try to get over disappointment and whatever other difficult emotions the incident might have brought up and continue to be of support to this person. Some openly admitted that they wouldn't be able to help breaking off all contact.

Later we got a little bit off-track and went back to the first comment of the whole session, Allen's idea that the crimes of one person cast shadows on all their family. Some of us admitted that we had encountered similar attitudes in our own societies, but pointed out that we considered it quite old-fashioned and inhuman (or irreligious) in its lack of compassion... Allen admitted to this, but also made it very clear that his original reaction reflected the general view in his society. I then privately remembered the accounts of a couple of acquaintances of mine from that country, people who referred to the "good families" of possible romantic interests of theirs.

The unfairness of this view is the strongest impression i've been left with from this workshop.

Anyway, someone else finally took us back to the issue of AIDS, drawing a parallel between "dishonorable" actions of individuals tainting whole families and the social stigma usually attached to people sick with AIDS resulting in the shunning not only of themselves, but of their relations.

Although the consideration of these cases made for interesting ethical exercises, i'm still not sure how they tied to religion. Much more interesting were the arguments about the duplicity of certain religious groups, which with their "Hate-the-sin-and-not-the-sinner" philosophies are happy to set up aid centers to care for infected people, but oppose the use of protection such as condoms, which would help prevent infection in the first place. Most everybody agreed that avoiding promiscuity was better protection yet, but that denying condoms to those who could or would not live by such a rule was equivalent to condemning the supposedly beloved sinners.

At one point in our discussion, Phumi from S. mentioned how in her country the problem was more cultural than religious, as people believed that using condoms was simply a denial of their national identity.

We truly are a mixed (up) species, aren't we?

Revolutions

I don't believe in revolutions. It's just that they have too much of that: they tend to make things revolve, go in cycles. Look at the French and American revolutions, past lunges at freedom and equality in countries whose governments today rule primarily for the benefit of rich corporations; look at the Cuban revolution, already stumbling and being worked against by the exiled outside and the disillusioned inside.

If you have a revolution, it's very likely that in 30, 50 or a 100 years you will have a counter-revolution (except that the counter-revolutionaries would call it a revolution, too). The part of society that you stomped on during your revolution will grow in the dark, under the grooves in your soles, and no matter how heavy your feet are, they'll eventually shoot up branches and destabilize you till you topple. Even if you killed the last one of "them", even if their views were indeed responsible for a lot of unhappiness in your society, the violence you used legitimizes any future violence against you.

This is not to say that I don't see the need for change. In the particular case of our modern global society, where the greed for profit takes advantage of such obsolete ideas as national identity and local pride to blindside people into supporting policies that devastate their neighbors and, ultimately, ruin their own future, change is imperative.

But there are alternatives to violence. There have to be. A change of regime is not enough. We need to change the mode of historical change.

The Story of Stuff

Check this out:
En español: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THGlNspyXDc
Or in English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8

On bloggin and facebooking

I feel almost furtive writing here again. Most of the bloggers in my contact list have abandoned the blogging arena, their latest entries dating back to sometime in 2007. They are happily facebooking around, now. There's even a blog application over there, and i've indeed tried it, but there's too much traffic, too many buttons and links... Not to deny the merits of facebook nor anything (i mean, it's almost replaced e-mail for me) but as far as blogging goes, facebook seems like the easy way out. Instead of making an effort to knead your thoughts together, you can simply get away with a one-liner answer to the "what are you doing right now?" question on top of the main page. It's quite distracting.
Here, instead, the cybernetic air is purer, one has more space to breathe. Been thinking of taking my blog up again for a while now, and yesterday i posted my first entry.

Almost a lynching

I watched the saddest video today.

One can basically see this thief, or rather, the crowd that surrounds him when they catch him red handed, apparently trying to pick the pockets of an elderly man in my hometown in Argentina. They're talking to the thief and among themselves as they wait for the police to arrive, everything caught on camera by someone who gets there running, obviously desperate to capture the action. It's a summer day, short sleeves and bermuda shorts all around.

The thief is kneeling in a corner (you see him later), but at first you can only hear his voice: "I haven't done anything. Nothing happened." There's fear in it, and his Spanish is quite different from that of his captors, all from a different class, quite united against him. One of them, a guy younger than me, probably another regular passer by on his way somewhere when detoured by the fracas, says: "Let's kill him. Let's hang him from a tree and burn him. It's your fault that in this country we are in the situation we are." Literally.

The old man wants at him, too, but a couple of guys nearest the thief luckily make sure nobody touches him til the police arrives. When two officers finally do, they're greeted by general applause, and some irony. "Los bicivoladores", someone mutters, as they dismount from their bikes. Finally we see the thief, a slight, dark haired man on his knees. One of the policemen pulls the guy's hands back and cuffs them; his face is shoved against the wall. The crowd begins to disperse, and the video ends here.