Karma Made In India - Not Solely – Part 2

After New Delhi Rapes, Should the Culprits Be Executed? An article by Nilanjana Bhowmick, published in Time magazine in 2011was the stimulus for this three-part mind-meander.

Quick text update: Six years later, India has not yet found a viable answer to that painful question. In the west, ongoing acts of violence towards women of all ages, ranging from assault and battery to rape and aggravated rape have, never in living memory, been so prevalent and so discussed in the media,

Here and now, as we reach the end of 2017, it seems as if a blindfold had suddenly been removed from collective eyes.

The west, rightly so, is writhing uncomfortably.

How can the amplitude of our homegrown complacency come as such a surprise to so many?

There is no more dumb or blind that the one who neither wants to think nor see.

Of course, most men, in varying degrees, at one time or another, have shown a lack of respect to at least a couple of women – to their bodies and to their minds. Even, but not particularly, puny losers.

Of course, any man with any degree of power, real or imagined, has callously made the most of that advantage - across all industries, including that of music and politics.

Is there a man who honestly doubts that?

As per the cultural values of their country, the vast majority of mothers and sisters in India, in most other emerging countries, as in the west, raise boys as ‘privileged beings’.

How many more husbands, sons and brothers of the thousands of women demonstrating against the government, in India, in Africa and here in Australia, Europe and America, have committed the act of incest or rape since 2011?

When it comes to dark, incestuous rape in our midst and elsewhere, it is usually with a gasp that we hear the wife, the mother claim that she had no idea that ‘it’ had been going right under her nose.

Oh, of course, it is easy to imagine a wife, a mother, so entrenched in the business of ‘living’, of ‘making a living’, of making a family that she might miss various tip-off clues. But then again, no - not really.

Nothing untoward is ever allowed to happen to girls and women in any culture without the tacit collusion of mothers, aunts and grandmothers. The silent enabling of the justice system is the other crucial party in these behaviours that reflect so poorly on our global society.

When it comes to the matter of girl infanticide and the culture of genital mutilation, there again, men alone would have been incapable of maintaining such practices from century to century.

Everywhere in the world, men who insist on such practices are tacitly assisted by the women in whichever culture they belong.

Ironically and sadly, too, these women are the same ones who very much still feel in their flesh the loss and the abuse done to them years hence.

Without the tacit consent of women, none of the practices that defile the body of girls and women and inflict permanent damage to their psyche or their body could have endured for so long.

Without women’s consent, no man would be ever able to force himself on to a child, a sister, a stranger and, in this lifetime, remain unpunished in one way or another.

Yes, of course, though they contribute to it and mostly embrace it, women, themselves are victims of their own culture.

Nothing happens in isolation. Everything is part and parcel of the whole.

So, we all need to be a lot more aware of what we feed into the whole.

Through learnt helplessness and a sense of self-preservation, they have been the active guardians of ‘cultural’ practices that enshrine repressive laws and practices of abuse deemed by men as non-negotiable, necessary shields against their own insecurities and their libido.

Would tribal men have dispensed retributive punishment if, as one, all the women in any given region had banded together, aeons ago, to indicate to all their men that No More meant No More?

What would have happened ‘over there’ and here, in the west, if aeons ago women had suspended all manner of services to adolescent boys and men until social leaders had worked out a moratorium of these practices?

If the group protection theory that ‘there is safety in numbers’ is true, then ... globally, such immoral practices against women would surely have been stamped out by now.

Yes, of course, though they contribute to it and mostly embrace it, women, themselves are victims of their own culture – and so are men in vastly different ways.

Nothing happens in isolation.

Everything is part and parcel of the whole.

So, we all need to be a lot more aware of what we feed into the whole.

Reality check: Yes, of course, there would have been casualties, but aren’t there always casualties in the fight of Caring vs Abusive?

Truly, his mind-meander is not intended to be a feminist rant. In fact, this section is no more than a round-about way of getting back to the concept of karma in action.

Karmically-speaking, it stands to reason that even silent collaboration – an energetic accomplice to overt practices – cannot be karma neutral.

It, too, spins an energetic web through the person’s energetic field that, in its inimitable way, affects the perpetrator’s circumstances in this lifetime.

There can be no doubt that, any and all, overt and covert practices that hurt, maim or kill anyone, be that family, friend or foe, are karma-adding in this lifetime.

Equally, there can be no doubt that the total sum of the karmic debts these persons have accrued in this lifetime will, to a degree, spill across to the next incarnations of their souls.

Thus, to others not yet born, they are doing as has been done on to them.

A sobering thought, perhaps, as this ‘passing on’ of unamended karmic debts obviously also applies to each one of us but, then again, Ecclesiastes 1-9 does state that, ‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.’

Sadly, this rings true and will remain true unless we chose to alter, right here, right now, our personal M.O. as fathers, uncles and brothers. And as sisters, mothers and grandmothers, wherever we happen to live.

Hand-on-heart, we can set out to earnestly amend what we can amend in this lifetime - humbly, quietly - in our own way. That is, provided the persons we have hurt in varying degree, deceived or loved inadequately are still in this world.

Once we no longer have access to them, any amending becomes impossible.

Though remorse, prayers and a hope of absolution might make us feel better, they cannot amend anything on our behalf. Not even if Catholic Pope and his priests think they, mere humans, have the power to undo any of our actions – or to render them null and void.

Thus, our karmic deficit shadows us like the Repo Man, the dreaded debt collector, shadows the dodgy debtor - but ... across lifetimes.

During the anti-rape demonstrations in India, a recurring protest placard was Punish Rapists Not Protestors. In the west, from years past, the slogan has been Punish the Rapists Not The Women.

To what changes can ‘punishment’ possibly lead when clearly, worldwide, the notion of ‘punishment’ is not perceived as a deterrent?

Serious question: why so many years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed in 1948 and accepted by more than 100 countries, has the protection of women and girls [and young boys] been expressed in such a low-key murmur in our democratic countries?

This question notwithstanding, just as spider webs extend far beyond the spiders, karmically speaking, the dark energy of misdeeds and wrongdoings extends far beyond the moral culpability of the aggressors and passive participants.

In varying degrees, that energy extends to all who have been enabling and assisting the perpetration of the crimes, regardless of their intentions.

That includes those lawmakers and other citizens who, instead of actively moving to control the crime better, have only thought of their purpose, position and posture within their ranks.

The cultural ‘privileging’ of males in any culture, regardless of their age is the main contributing factor of violence towards girls and women. The privileging of strong physically or mentally robust males versus those who appear less ‘endowed’, is another most important factor.

The hope to give a child a better life by selling her [or him] to a stranger, of sparing a child a hard life by killing her at birth are understandable but feed the channel of abuse to children.

The intention of making girls culturally empowered by mutilating their genitals and having allowed a government’s One Child policy to favour boys are both damned.

All these practices generate dark energy commensurate with the fear, pain and despair they generate in the young victims.

In the ever-pulsating, self-updating realm of karma, each of these deeds results in value-added, karma-added, dark energy. Which, then, results in more rounds of testing challenges, societal and personal, since we are all in it together.