Please read it, it is good.
I have only so far read 2 or 3 profiles of the victims, and one was an architect who was a Muslim and had done a thesis on Mecca pilgrimages--so--it is sad to say this, but it is really "equal opportunity carnage" and most of the victims were in the prime of life, highly educated and with income levels to match.
It is so sad, and really, more needs to be done on the poor disenfranchised areas of (European) cities--
when I was at Penn, the director of the Christian Center told me how they regularly used to have to rescue freshmen (freshers) who were lonely in college and ended up joining cults and giving up their passports.
They had to be de-brainwashed, she told me.
This was a lovely woman who had adopted a black child and became a pastor herself, because she said, "In the (American) Midwest, I could only be a pastor's wife, not a pastor myself."
She went on to get a Ph.D. in Theology.
I am afraid "religion" for some is becoming a kind of murderers' club--in the name of religion.
An Eritrean artist I interviewed said, "People like ritual because it gives them structure and identity and they can do things by rote" (according to "the law").
I hate to say it, but my late friend Y became more religious and rule-bound in the West, whereas at home mutual friends said she could and did sit with Chinese friends who were eating pork at the same table.
I only wish the "must" in her, as in "I must stay registered in the best business school in the world" had been less strong in her.
As Zarine our Parsi friend from Bombay said, "How many universities do you think there are in the USA? About 3 thousand."
And my transportation professor only advised I change departments, which I did, pulling a political scientist in to be my dissertation chairman.
--
This is by the way, but once when we were discussing our plight together ref. our papers, and our lawyer, she told me not to sit on her bed if I was menstruating, because then she would have to launder the whole thing.
The bed at that time was like Hans Christian Anderson's the Princess on a Pea.
Not only a sheet and top sheet, certainly, but also a thick quilted counterpane.
I obediently sat on a chair.
--
In Bali, another friend was shocked because a temple said, "Please do not come if if you have your monthly courses."
She asked "Why?"
I said, "Well, we are Buddhists, but Hinduism is older--"
I knew from my friends in Boulder, probably one of the most liberal of US cities, that you cannot go to a Hindu puja if you are menstruating.
As I was not, I went with my new friend who allowed me to stay with her for 3 weeks before the dorm opened in Philadelphia. I felt really at home with all the Indian women. I felt at home in Hema's house, when I could hear in the morning her computer specialist husband praying.
I don't know what language it was, maybe Hindi, but I could tell it was a prayer.
She would tell her son, then about 11 at the time, "Put the ham away,--is coming." I did not understand until she and the mutual friend said, they could not eat meat. G. brushed her teeth when she accidentally bit into a meat flavored potato chip--
-- And there were more racist incidents, or racist looks from an Egyptian man, when I was happily walking home through Powelton, talking with two black women friends, one an African American from the Virgin Islands who had been a Fulbright in India, and one an Ethiopian who had been arrested in Ethiopia and had been to Burma while working for an airline.
Molu told me of the bad condition in which Russian tenants left a house, peeing in the fireplace, and she said she read Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in an Ethiopian prison.
She reminded me of a wonderful and elegant Ethiopian Bruck Kebede, who my sister and I knew in Poland as a classmate, and the Nigerian, whose name I have forgotten, but who showed me the poem he had written on the bus when we came back from Auschwitcz/Oswiencim.
I tried to replicate some of the sentiments in one of my poems.
"And all this hair (in the warehouse in the concentration camp, only one left for display, but piled high to the roof--The Nazi's recycled the hair to weave upholstery cloth)
"And all this hair
was once on the head of some woman
who was once loved by some man--"
I can say that I have been many places, and met many humane people.
I can say I am better than many people who stayed in Burma, learned to get on and survived and got rich.
I am more broad minded.
I try not to make snap judgements about people.
I don't measure by the $ income rod.
--
In the 1980s, in Philadelphia, "there were already religion-based killings by fundamentalists?
one victim an Islamic scholar at Penn who was shot down in his home.
I remember my thesis supervisor telling me "I will never study Islam, these people are fanatics."
And he never did.
Some of the people mentioned in this piece, were Muslims, one Parsi, some Christians, some Hindus, and I have no idea what the religions of the others' were.
I never thought to ask, and I don't think religion is relevant.
It is just a crutch.
KMKaung
11-16-2015
I have been to both places.
