Meirav's posts with tag: ethics
Am reading The Kite Runner (by Khaled Hosseini) and came across a scene that says something very sad about the way we humans sometimes tend to think. (Warning: if you haven't read the book yet and don't want to know what happens then click away now...) The scene I'm talking about is the beating and rape of a young boy by a gang of kids. They're the neighbourhood bullies and they hate him because he's of the "wrong" ethnic group and because he once dared to stand up to the gang leader. They've cornered him in a secluded alley and this is their opportunity for revenge. They beat him up, and then, as they're holding him down on the ground, there is a debate amongst them about whether or not to rape him. (It's not that they're gay and are attracted to him, the purpose of the rape is not sexual gratification, just a way of thoroughly humiliating the boy and teaching him not to mess with them.) The bit that got me thinking was when one of the boys says: "My father says it's sinful." You could easily miss it, it's such a brief sentence. But if you pause for a moment and think, you will see what is so horrifying about it - and this kind of thing happens all over the world all the time, not just in Afghanistan in the 1970s. This boy expresses no problem with cruelty to a fellow human being, he has no issue with the three of them beating this kid to a pulp, he is not concerned for their victim's feelings. He is concerned about one aspect of this: that his father told him that having sex with another man is a sin, so if he does that he may get into trouble with his God. He is worrying about getting punished for contravening a certain regulation to do with sexual morality, but he is not concerned about what to most of us hopefully is clearly a sin, which is cruelty and violence towards another person. He's not thinking it's wrong to treat this kid in this way, he's just worrying about contaminating himself spiritually by doing an immoral sexual act. It would be easy to point fingers and say, well, what do they know, they're moslems. But that wouldn't be true - people of different faiths have managed to do this sort of thing, to focus on certain aspects of right and wrong whilst developing a blindness to other aspects. Didn't our Jewish prophets cry out to us centuries ago to wake up and realise that God is much more interested in how we treated the poor and marginalised than in the sacrifices we brought to the Temple? (And I can't help thinking of some of our folk today who somehow manage to think it's okay to throw stones at fellow Jews because they are seen to be violating the Sabbath. Focusing on Sabbath-keeping but not quite practising Love Your Neighbour...) And sadly Christians too have been known to fall into this trap. Those who tortured Jews during the Spanish Inquisition thought of themselves as very devout Christians! When I was learning to drive, much emphasis was placed on checking your blind spot before moving off. Lord God, help us all to keep checking our blind spots!
There was a news item in my local paper about someone killed in a hit and run accident. And suddenly I found myself thinking: isn't it awful that we have a name for this? I mean, isn't it awful that someone running over a fellow human being and then leaving them there is a thing that has happened enough times for us to feel the need to give it a name? There are lots of things like that once you start thinking about it - words and phrases that tell us how low we have sunk. We have words and phrases to describe one person killing another, one person forcing another to do the thing that is supposed to be an act of love, one person paying another for this act, one person offering herself (or himself) to others for sexual gratification, one person physically hurting the person they claim to love, and so on and so forth - all these terrible things that we do to one another, that are so awful that they should really be unheard of, they should be shocking, they should be things that just don't happen... but they have become things that happen so much that we have given them names.
I'm not one of those PC fanatics - just a person with a conscience which annoyingly comes into play at some of the most inconvenient moments, such as when I feel like repeating a joke I've heard but then I realise that actually this joke gets a laugh at the expense of a whole load of people who have done nothing to deserve it. For instance a friend recently texted me a very funny joke about Mick and Paddy - well, it is funny, but it perpetuates the lie that Irish people are stupid, and do I really want to do that? Same goes for blondes, etc. I found myself thinking about Jewish humour and how back home we used to tell jokes about people being stupid and of course they weren't racist, were they, we just told jokes about the people of Chelm, which was a mythical place where stupid people lived, right? Wrong. I've just looked it up on Wikipedia and it turns out that Chelm was a real town in eastern Poland which in Jewish humour became the legendary capital of foolishness. So what do we do? Can we invent a fictional place with some fictional characters so that we can tell jokes about foolishness without perpetuating stupid prejudice? Perhaps we could invent a land called Foolland, where the Foolish live? Here's my feeble attempt at telling a joke without treading on anyone's toes. Let's see if it works. Daft and Brush are walking home after a night out and pass the bus garage. 'Let's just steal a bus,' says Daft, not wanting to walk, and offers to keep watch. Twenty minutes later he looks in to find Brush in a flap, 'I can't find a number 7! ''You idiot,' says Daft, 'just take a number 9 and we'll walk from the roundabout.'
Have just finished reading a really nice novel (The Peacock Emporium by Jojo Moyes) and I find myself thinking: When did this happen?  At what point in the history of modern fiction did leaving your husband for someone else become a nice happy ending for a novel? I feel like going in search of the main character, Suzannah, and saying: Excuse me, but what exactly did you think when you said all that stuff about "till death do us part"? Did you have your fingers crossed behind your back as you stood there in your beautiful wedding dress, thinking, "Yes well... of course what I really mean is until I have some sort of midlife identity crisis and ditch you for someone with more fire in his blood"? How annoying that not one of the characters voices the view - is it really considered so outdated - that following your emotions is not necessarily the best course of action, that marriage is something to work at! Sorry, no, I now realise that there was one person who voiced that opinion - her poor husband when she told him she was leaving him. I wouldn't be so annoyed if he had been an awful husband, but his only fault seems to be his ability to remain content in the face of all the turbulence that life and his wife were dishing out to him. So he puts up with his wife binge-shopping them into debt, he puts up with his wife being moody and impossible when she's setting up in business, he puts up with her changing her mind about having children with him, he puts up with her general spoilt brat mentality throughout, all because presumably he actually took seriously those vows they made when they got married, but then his wife just suddenly says she's leaving, and that's that. End of marriage. Okay, I've got that off my chest now.  
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