TheBanyanTree: Re:The biter bitter ...and bitterer

[JMoney]

Julie wrote:

> I hesitate, only for second,
> to voice a view that may be considered "political" in our story forum.

I suppose most of us were told at one time or another that there are three
subjects that ought not to be raised in polite conversation and they are
politics, religion and sex.  The last time I looked the Tree guidelines said
all three are OK with the sole proviso that sex should not be treated
pornographically.  Flaming, however, is not OK.

Politics, religion and sex are the stuff of life.  To my mind everything to
do with human relationships is political and everything to do with belief
systems about the meaning of life, or the lack of such meaning, is
religious.  Sex has to do with both pleasure and pain and is far too
important to all of us for the writing about it to be treated merely as an
opportunity for some lewd titillation.  But writers must feel free to write
about all three or be so severely hampered by lack of material as to make
writing a frivolous and sterile occupation.

So it concerns me that Julie should hesitate, even for a second, to write
something about a subject that some may consider "political".  Since the
Tree guidelines don't forbid it I can only assume that the worry must be
about the possibility of being "flamed".

Flaming itself is a political act and a thuggish one at that.  It is an
attempt to force one's opinion on others, or to silence them, through
abusiveness and intimidation.  It is what bullies do.  As someone who spent
a great deal of her childhood in fear of being bashed by a bullying older
sister I loathe bullies but I am also still susceptible to their tactics.

Because of that susceptibility there were things that I wrote during the
recent war in Iraq that I never posted for fear of being attacked for
thinking my thoughts.  For instance there's "Baghdad Bob" aka "Comical Ali"
who seems to have resurfaced recently.  So many people seemed to think his
lies were merely amusing but I can't see them as anything but a dreadful
display of the man's complete lack of a moral conscience.  Was it Stalin or
someone else who spoke of the Big Lie and of how repeating it often enough
would make believers of those who listened?  If Baghdad Bob and Joseph
Stalin were to meet would they find themselves to be soulmates, at least
where the business of lying is concerned?  If one is considered a monster of
sorts why not the other?

Who owns the high moral ground?  None of us.  All of us are finite creatures
whose knowledge of events, even those events occurring within our own
households, can only be partial at best.  And even if we are convinced that
what we now believe is "The Truth" didn't we all come to that point by a
circuitous route during the travelling of most of which we believed that
something else entirely was "The Truth"?  Shall we convince others that they
ought to believe what we believe by being rude to them?  I don't think so.

So Julie, I thank you for your writing efforts and thank God for your tender
heart.  I agree with you on this:

> It is a story of suffering, disease,
> starvation, malaria, diarrea, malnutrition.  And dear god, some of it is
> preventable.

But I don't agree with you on this:

> [I]t is not about politics.

Infant mortality is highest in places where women have less access to
education.  There are places in the world that are quite poor by our
standards but where the infant mortality rate approaches that of Western
countries.  These include places, such as Kerala in India and Cuba, where
girls have about the same right to be educated as boys do.  On the other
hand there are places where the people are much richer but where the
education of female children is terminated early.  In these countries infant
mortality is higher.  Generally these tend to be what we regard as Muslim
countries.  So you could consider that it is a form of religion, expressed
politically, that is the ultimate cause of the high rates of infant
mortality in those countries.

In Australia Aboriginal women living in remote communities have a much
higher rate of infant mortality than in the rest of Australia and partly
that's due to a high rate of diarrhoeal disease.  Whether the rate is higher
than it was before Aboriginal people were gathered together into these
communities is, as far as I know, an open question.  Girls in these
communities have far better access to educational opportunities than do
girls in, say, Rwanda or Nepal or Afghanistan and the infant mortality rate
among Aboriginal mothers from these communities is not as high as in many
third world countries.  Indeed a great deal of money and effort has been
spent here to improve the survival rates of infants born to these mothers
and many small-for-dates babies have survived who once would have died only
(it seems) to suffer later on from what may be the consequences of poor
intra-uterine growth.  Currently this seems to be expressing itself in a
high rate of kidney disease secondary, at least partially, to having lower
absolute numbers of  filtering units (the nephron) per kidney and a high
rate of skin infections with Strep pyogenes (secondary to recurrent scabies
infestations) which tends to cause an immune response that destroys the
nephrons and eventually leads to end-stage renal failure.

As you might guess from the above the whole business is very complicated and
sorting out causality from association is difficult.  Nevertheless I feel
fairly confident in saying that the politics of indigenous
self-determination, combined with certain remnant cultural (read, political)
practices and the political and monetary difficulties of supplying services
such as abundant clean running water to every little settlement of 20 - 40
people out in woop-woop, has created a situation in which babies (who keep
getting skin infections) continue to be born to ill-nourished young mothers
who are not equipped, either socially or educationally, to deal adequately
with the challenge of caring for their children in the way that we "white
folks" think is best.

I haven't even mentioned tyrannical war-lords and endemic government
corruption but I think it's safe to say that politics has a lot to do with
"suffering, disease, starvation, malaria, diarrea, malnutrition" and so on.

Janice