Apprehended Violence

 

I think the phrase ‘how the other half lives’ is particularly appropriate for the era of awakening we are currently experiencing. It’s usually used in a socio-economic context, to describe the sharp contrasts between the wealthy and privileged, and those who lack the protections afforded by assets and income flow. 

It’s a phrase which articulates inequality of power and status. But I think it is very usefully applied to the gender divide, and especially in relation to sexual harassment. 

If a country has a Crimes Act, under which various acts of assault, abuse, violence and mistreatment committed by its citizens are categorized, and penalties accorded to perpetrators, there is supposedly some degree of clarity on this matter. Theoretically. If members of the general populace are aware of the existence of such legislation, and of how what they experience would be viewed and charged under such legislation. 

But in the rush and whirl of our everyday life, how many people are actually knowledgeable about what constitutes harassment? Logic suggests that the people who commit it are less likely to be aware of their behaviour as wrongdoing than those who are impacted by it. It is the victim who suffers the impact of violent and unsettling behaviour, and according to Anti-Discrimination Law, the definition of the behaviour is therefore defined by the victim: it is a subjective test. 

Thus most defenders of perpetrators of sexual violence, abuse and harassment will try to discredit the character and reputation of the victim, in multiple ways. Crimes which show visible signs of having been perpetrated, and where visible damage has been done to the body of a victim by aggravated assault, rape, battery and other physical actions, are generally considered by the general public to be ‘more serious.’

Crimes which are considered ‘less serious’ are those which do not involve physical violence being done to a person’s body, and involve money (for example, fraud and embezzlement), property (illegal actions to acquire title deeds to land), and people’s emotions. 

The last category, which is an emotional and psychological domain, is very difficult for the legal system to identify, define, and measure. And that is exactly the space occupied by harassment: that low level, verbal, cumulative barrage of interference with a person’s privacy, body, dignity and personal space, which is experienced almost every day, by one half (52%) of the population far more than the other. 

I see a lot of statistics being cited which claim that 90% of women in this country have been and are being molested or harassed on public transport. High levels of street harassment, of verbal abuse, and lewd and suggestive, degrading behaviour are also experienced apparently far more by women and girls than men and boys. 

Three years ago, I saw a comments thread on Facebook which followed a post made by a young female law student, who was standing waiting to cross the road in a large regional city. A bus full of male prisoners was blocking her path, waiting for the traffic lights to change colour. Several of the men in the bus leaned out of the windows and yelled gross comments to this young woman about her appearance and what they would like to do to her. 

The police officers on the bus, she said in her post, not only did not reprimand or rebuke these men, but actually laughed with them, and treated her embarrassment and anger as a joke. In her post on Facebook, she said how profoundly disgusted she felt, not only by the behaviour of the men, who were being transported from one place of institutional correction to another, but by the lack of moral responsibility shown by the officers involved, who were in charge of overseeing them. 

She went on to ask how could anyone doubt her when she said that the public standards of conduct of men towards women were a degradation to the reputation of the whole country. The comments thread on her post was eye-opening to me. 

Some people said she was being over-sensitive, that the comments of the men could have been taken as complimentary, as recognition of her physical attractiveness. Some others said what could she expect from convicts, who are already people who have no moral compass, and wasn’t she holding them to an unrealistic standard. 

Still others said that this kind of behaviour is normalised and par for the course, and why is she making such a fuss about it? It’s nothing new. Others calling themselves nationalists who were proud of their country accused her of tarnishing the name of the motherland with her social justice warrior screeching. Look at other countries in the world, they said. They’re just as bad. Don’t single out our country as if we’re worse than the others. It happens everywhere. 

This, you see, is what those who present as male often fail to understand. Women and girls who they know and see every day, who live in the same country and neighbourhood as they do, who are working alongside them in an office or work environment, actually live in a completely different world of experience from the one which they themselves inhabit. 

Men  do push and shove each other from time to time, but it’s usually due to territorial aggression, not sexually motivated, and on public transport it’s quite often by accident. In contrast, the reports from women on Facebook and other social media, and the encounters they film on their mobile phones as evidence of what they have experienced, show very targeted and specifically sexual behaviour, aimed at using a situation of unavoidable physical proximity, such as a crowded bus or train, as an opportunity to grab hold of the body and person of a woman as she waits for the bus or train to reach her stop. 

Incident after incident records that the other passengers who observe what is happening do not support the woman being harassed. They stay silent, look away or act as if it’s not happening. Their silence adds to the sense that this is normalised, and in some sense acceptable behaviour, nothing to make a fuss about. The person shamed is the victim, for being the target of the behaviour, and for drawing attention to herself by speaking out about it. 

Imagine if your stressful and challenging 8 or 9 hour work day is regularly prefaced and appended by a 1.5 hour commute which is an ordeal of harassment, verbal and physical, that you know is going to happen to you going to and from work every day of your working life. This is what is called ‘apprehended violence’. You know from direct, lived experience that this is likely to happen because it often does happen, and nothing and no one stops it, every time it does. 

That apprehension of violence, experienced over time, causes anxiety in even the most naturally optimistic and resilient individual, and frames the perspective you have of the society and of yourself. It directly damages your quality of life. It’s exhausting to undergo such anxiety, feeling like you are personally under a form of siege, during a time when the country is technically at peace. 

Spitting is listed in the Crimes Act legislation of some countries, as a form of assault. Not only is it an indication of contempt and hostility, when directed at a human target, but it also is a bodily product which is dangerous as it potentially carries infection from the perpetrator to the target. 

Verbal insults, expletives, innuendo and threats also constitute harassment. They do not leave physical evidence but are designed to unsettle and upset the target, and make them feel singled out, interfered with and intimidated. 

Many men seem to be unaware and unconcerned that their words and actions make women uncomfortable. Some men even seem to actively enjoy causing distress and anxiety: having an impact on women and girls in such a visible way, without being held accountable in a way physical assault would cause them to be.

A great deal of harassment is regarded as non serious, as comic or juvenile, as acting out, as signs that ‘boys will be boys’, and the indulgence extended to that behaviour by our society reinforces and rewards it. 

What it is vitally important to recognize is that this ‘unserious’ harassment is on a spectrum of violent behaviour. From ‘least serious’ to ‘most serious’, all of it can be classified as violent in intention, in the desire to shame, to cause harm to the dignity or sense of safety or decency of the woman who is targeted. 

Staring hard at someone you don’t know, obstructing their path, making obscene gestures with your hands, implying that they are a mere object of mockery or attraction to you, making suggestive implications and insinuations about their effect on you, or what they could do for you, or what you want to do to them - all of that inappropriate conduct comes from not only ignorance but willful unawareness and lack of empathy and accountability regarding the harm such actions cause. 

Harassment is on a spectrum of human violence. Even actions at the milder end of that range cause harm.

Virtue Signalling

 

In a society where we are increasingly separated from each other, by the use of technology and now by the threat of viral illness, it will surely become inevitable that in the gaps between us, misunderstandings and mistrust will flourish. 

There are a lot of doomsday merchants around, broadcasting the woes of the human race. We are on the brink of self-extinction as a species, say some scientists. The coronavirus is systematically attacking the weakest among us, apparently - physically and economically. Those with the weakest systems will fail, and fall. This is a culling of the human race. Natural selection, in a world which has normalized a lot of unnatural behaviour. 

Amongst these contemporary n+1 conundrums, is the increasingly widespread belief that we have incrementally brought this crisis on ourselves, through our self-serving greed, ignorance, self-indulgence, apathy and stupidity. For example, by eating so much meat we have created cruel and unnatural animal husbandry practices, like factory farming and mass injection of hormones into animals and birds, to fatten them up artificially for human consumption. 

We then ingest these hormone-infused animal products. Is it any wonder that our own physical systems are affected? On a moral or spiritual level, we are consuming the body of animals killed in terror at the brutality they have faced. Can we be really at peace, knowing that we are literally feeding off such a process? Does doing so increase or decrease our health? Advertising and self-justifying promotion by the meat and poultry and dairy industry CEOs does not alter the fact that eating red or white, mass produced meat fried in animal fat reduces our immunity and vitality. 

While facing the prospect of changing our eating habits, and confronting the shallow materialism to which we have succumbed, we ourselves fall prey to all kinds of prophets and cult leaders, across the religious and political spectrum. They target our known vulnerabilities, and promise us prosperity, abundance, happiness and safety in exchange for our investment in them and their institutions, parties, businesses and corporations.  But trusting in these prophets brings personal loss. 

I think of cartoons when I think of this situation. In ‘The Wizard Of Id’, the wife of the great man is asked how she manages to get the white clothes she washes to look so white. ‘I rinse them in white paint’, she replied. 

I think also of the brilliant ‘Asterix and The Soothsayer’, where an out-of-work, materialistic mendicant briefly enjoys the generosity of the superstitious and gullible people of the ‘little village we know so well’. ‘When the storm is over, the weather will improve’, he remarks, and it seems to them to be an utterance of profound wisdom. 

The global systems on which we have relied, which mass produce fried chicken and one-size-fits-all clothes, and which exploit both the workers who create the products and the consumers who use them, are breaking down. Viral illness, also globalized, and apparently uncontainable, is affecting the supply chains. It is as if we are being sharply awakened from a complacent dream of world domination and prosperity thinking which the younger generation at least don’t want any part in perpetuating. Not if it makes us oblivious to the trouble we are in. 

Niccolo Machiavelli commented in ‘The Prince’ that ‘everyone sees only what we appear to be, and very few know who we really are’. Do we know who profits from our losses? Or do we simply believe what is presented to us? Being pure of faith, and childlike in our trust? Can we be sure that our food is processed humanely, and prepared hygienically? Can we be confident that the decisions made on our behalf will benefit us, and not harm us? 

Are people who look good to us, their public image tailored to appeal to the masses, branded as beautiful and sincere, ticking all the brand boxes as family-friendly, authentic, passionate, and so on - really what they seem to be? How can we tell? 

One of the ironic advantages of being increasingly disenchanted by the hypocrisy and the criminality of the behaviour of those global perpetrators whose activities are exposed as fraudulent in this era, is that scepticism painfully replaces our sentiment. It seems like a loss, because we can no longer sit pretty, unshakeably certain that the world around us is progressing in ways that we agree with and feel fortified by. We had inhabited an airbrushed, whitewashed ‘reality’. 

A long time ago, near Bethlehem, speaking of whitewashing, Jesus accused the pompous Pharisees of his own era of being ‘whited sepulchers’: 

‘Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside, but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean’. (The Bible, The New International Version). 

In a dissociated world where we do not approach each other to observe each other’s activities closely, or are not able to do so, due to legal protocol or privacy measures, or ‘hands off’ arrangements which distance actors from their actions; the outward appearance of beauty, a curated combination of heraldic blazons, seems to suggest meanings to the observer which are easy to believe. Symbolism is employed, because images speak louder than words. Especially if no one is within actual hearing distance, and everyone who is close enough to see how things operate is signed to non disclosure agreements. Or in societies of people whose primary literacy capacity is visual. 

What is actually being celebrated at a wedding with thousands of guests?? Is it real human joy, or the social status of the families of the adorable couple and their professional associates? Rent-a-crowds? 

What is actually being commemorated at a funeral where there are a large number of monks? Is it honest grief being expressed, or the self-serving affirmation of personal status pursued by those who enact the rituals? Professional mourners are paid to weep and wail, and the love and family feeling of the family and their social position is measured by the spectators at this event by the pitch and volume of the wailing, calculated in decibels as well as rupees. 

The number and cost of gifts, flowers and cards at birthdays, christenings, weddings and funerals is now a measure of both love and money. 

Who can distinguish between them? 

Nothing Exceeds Like Excess

Did we really need to have so much, and so often? As our bodies waxed fat, did our souls shrink thin? Are we all better off, actually, for an indefinite period of intermittent fasting? I am not talking here of those who never have enough to eat. 

I was surprised to see the queues at the superstores, and the empty shelves. I don’t think our generation has experienced the fear of actual hunger before. Even the most disciplined person has been conscious of their privilege. By acknowledging it, and the inequity that underlies it, they pay the social tax that enables them to go on attending the round of banquets and feasts that constituted life in the Capital. Rich people have further to fall. Their elevation makes them vulnerable. 

But I think if you have so much that you lose count, and the sense of each individual item becomes indistinct, over time you don’t feel the true worth and the luxury of having things. Bit by bit, Eke Eke Eke. It is pleasing that a phrase for metaphorically making something last as long as you can, ‘one by one by one’, is visually similar in English. 

The Branston Pickle Miser

 There’s a fine line between prudence and miserliness, stocking up and hoarding. I have heard a wealthy man complain at his own table that his wife’s guests were eating too much of his favourite Branston Pickle, and spreading too much clover honey on their morning toast. This was because he lived far away from his beloved England, and Fortnums did not deliver hampers full of Gentlemen’s Relish to his home, and rare commodities rise sharply in value. You could see him measuring the amounts with his eye, and finding the smallest teaspoons to put beside the jars of the precious delicacies. 

He had been dirt poor as a boy, he said: a scholarship kid at a cathedral school. And he grudged people’s wish to make him share because he knew how hard it was to create a personal hoard, and build a sanctuary, crisis-proof. He opens the store cupboard sometimes and just looks at the bottles, and touches their coin-shaped lids. 

A person sharing her experiences on Zoom recently said that, for the first time since she set up her own house, she is doing her own marketing, receiving her staples direct from the trucks that deliver fresh vegetables on the road; and she weighs each item in her hands, and knows the selling price of each, down to the smallest measure. She has never felt so grounded.

Self Made = Sovereignty 

 I too have been breaking new ground, in the new earth. My shellac manicure started to split and flake off weeks ago, as I dig in the garden to plant seeds for vegetables, in pots and in the small garden beds. My friends’ hair is growing grey they say - and I think they look lovelier this way. We speak to each other in our pyjamas in a way we have never done before. 

I never knew until now that you can grow whole pineapples in pots, by planting their spiky tops; or spinach by planting their white stalks in the earth. The store cupboard becomes less important when there are living things striving for life and expression in the garden, with their bright energy and stubbornness and momentum for joy. The slow natural progress sets a schedule of its own, and we adjust to it. The sun pours on us all: seeds and stalks and stems and human beings, each morning, and then the clouds come in and the rain falls every afternoon. There is harmony slowly building from the slowly earthing roots of our abruptly interrupted former life. 

We have left it very late, I know, but - even now - it feels like Time itself is on our side, and we have a wealth of it. 

Agile not Fragile

 When it looked like the 45th President of the United States was going to be successful in his presidential run, back in 2015-16, an African American woman of my acquaintance decided she was getting out of there.

Her family had lived in the United States for generations, and she had lived all her life in a pleasant, bustling mid-sized city, where she had a daughter and an extended family she was close to. Her roots went deep. But she said then she could see what was going to happen. You plant a demon seed, you raise a flower of fire. There would be rampant racism, and violence and maybe civil war, and the country would be divided on political and racial lines, over the next few years. Anyone wanting peace in the valley had better look for it somewhere over the rainbow. 

She posted her plans on Facebook. Fascinated, I observed her preparations to completely relocate herself and her work and her life to Costa Rica, a place she had once been to on holiday, and liked very much. She is a free-spirited lady, but she set about the process of moving in a systematic, thorough and practical way which was very effective. Visas were applied for, for herself and her daughter, and she looked up a place to rent via the Internet, in a good looking area of the country near a hospital and a shopping centre, a bank and a post office. She saved up the air fare for 18 months, left her house plants with her mother, put her favourite items of furniture in storage, and got on a flight to Costa Rica, just as the 45th President was being sworn in. 

The place she had rented was up on a hill, a bus trip from the centre of town, and the pictures she posted were full of vivid colourful foliage, blue skies and abundant greenery. She had a small balcony where she could sit and have a cup of tea in the morning, and observe the new world she had been brave enough to come to. She started to learn the local language, and explore the cuisine. She enjoyed the cheerfulness and openness of the local people, the relaxed atmosphere, the relatively low crime rate and the resulting lack of a Police presence. And once every week or so she would catch up with the news, to see what was going on back in the United States. She would order pizza, even though they didn’t make it so well in Costa Rica as her local place did, back where she grew up. 

She gradually made her new house a home, with local pottery and glassware and cushions from the markets. She was able to do her work online, with students learning from her via Zoom and Skype, and her relocated professional life flourished. She was one of the best prepared people for the COVID-19 crisis, as her income did not decrease, and her work processes were already in place to allow her to work from home. 

She is a person of bright intelligence, both intellectually (IQ) and emotionally (EQ). And she is very open-minded and adaptable, and does not waste time mourning over things she cannot do anything about. But even her good sense and equanimity have been challenged by the careening chaos of what is happening in the US, leading up to the next election. 

She described her feelings as she saw the protests starting in the cities after the murder of George Floyd, and the responses to the Black Lives Movement, as people started to panic and feel their privilege being ‘shook’, as she said. The pushback would be pretty predictably savage. People should get a hold of themselves and not get triggered. There’d be plenty of people with vested interests trying to stir up enmity. Her view is that this era is a pivotal time of choice, and that she hopes that many people would choose not to get defensive and oversensitive, but to grow up and get educated about the true history of the towns and cities they lived in, and the land they occupied. 

From her balcony chair on her beautiful hill in Costa Rica, she says that freedom of choice is the right of every person. But you have to act on what you believe, not just talk about it. She says, now is the time to be agile, not fragile. It’s a phrase so lovely, she should make it into a quotable quote, a meme, with its own hashtag. I suggest she write her life story as a memoir. She laughs, and says: I say it as I see it! Which is another way of explaining that she holds these truths to be self-evident. 

The Afterlife Of The Ugly Duckling

 I always loved the story of The Ugly Duckling. This young misfit had a terrible childhood, visibly and

unaccountably different from his brothers and sisters, and was commented on and pecked at by

everyone in the farmyard, including his own mother.

Driven by their unkindness from his home, he found similar experiences of cruelty and hostility in his

encounters in the outside world, with various farmers and other animals, whose scant kindness he

solicited, in desperation and hope.

Each cumulatively escalating experience of exclusion made him progressively disheartened, until he

gave up on having any kind of fulfilment at all, and stopped seeking shelter, even in the bitter winter,

which nearly killed him, with its extreme conditions. Hans Christian Andersen's description is

heartbreaking.

In that bleak midwinter, he expected to die. But somehow, in those subzero conditions both of weather

and of vitality, he survived to see the first signs of spring coming: The increasing warmth of the sun, the

dissolving of the snow, the frost and ice, the blossoming of flowers, and the blooming of the green

grass.

It is a great moment in the story when, as the ice on the lake has melted, he is able to swim a little way,

and sees a group of stately swans on the other side of the lake, across from him. He admires them

from afar, feeling them so far removed from his state of loveliness and ugliness. His early experiences

of rejection and humiliation have made him feel unworthy to even gaze at them.

Much to his horrified surprise, they swim across to greet him. Expecting to be scolded or even attacked,

he waits in passive terror for damage that never comes. The swans embrace him with affection and

respect, and show him his reflection in the pure and brimming waters of the lake: He is not a duckling,

and he is not even an ugly, full-grown duck. He is a swan, the most graceful and beautiful of birds.

And there the story ends. But... his true life begins! I have always thought that after the first shock and

amazement, he must have felt like he was in heaven.

And looking back, he would have realised that everything harsh that had happened to him had nothing

to do with his true value or worth. He had simply been wrongly characterised at the start, and identified

and judged by the wrong group. The true experiences he now would have would be directed rightly, at

the real individual he actually is, in the right place and at the right time.

I think it must have been for him, at that radiant point of transformation, like it is for spiritual people

who renounce their former identities and all the experiences that had gone with them. All the suffering

he had endured would fade in significance, because it was now ended, and would never recur. The only

part of it left would reside in his memory, which would contrast its grief with the brilliant joy that he

now experienced daily in the life he came into.

From sadness to joy, from winter to spring, from death to resurrection, from despair to hope, from

loneliness to joyful connection: It is a tale of endurance and of longed-for reward, which is beautiful in

its simplicity and gentle resolution.

No Longer Feeling Safe?

I hear some of the younger people in this society say they no longer feel safe, after the orchestrated events of Easter Sunday. Some were teens in the last stages of the Civil War and have only known a few short years of peace, in which to enjoy a freedom their peers in other countries have benefitted from. They were starting to feel a sense of optimism, and hope and possibility.

But terrorism knows no borders, and now no place on earth is immune to it. There are no safe spaces, in the world today. And whatever safety we feel may be temporary, and self-created - and yet that sense of safety is what makes us able to trust and believe in a better future, and act positively to make it happen. 

Governments cannot effectively provide such safe spaces, through increased security, increased vigilance or punitive sanctions. Terrorists are like snipers or guerilla forces - trained specialists targeting their victims -  individualized, entrepreneurial, radicalized mass murderers. Scapegoating minorities is no solution to the kind of wide scale damage these small numbers of people can perpetrate. These are people who benefit from the fear of others, and in whose eyes acts of atrocity are not shameful acts of cowardice but, somehow justifiable acts of merit. 

We live in profound uncertainty, and without safety, without guarantees or affirmations. And yet we must live: we cannot accept a cowering marginalization as our default condition. We must go about our daily lives. 

The sanctuary people seek in places of worship is being violated all over the world. And it is almost impossible to refrain from pursuing a predictable path of vengeance and retribution, for this gross disrespect. But the very predictability of it suggests that we are being manipulated. Now is the time to be mindful, and not reactive: not merely to be fuelled by fear and survivalism, but by a bigger vision of who would profit from minorities being prompted to turn on each other. 

I suggest that instead of mourning a sense of safety, we accept - not that we are not entitled to such safety, but that it is currently, in these conditions, not accessible to us. That the rights we thought we had: to live in peace, and dignity, and freedom, to co-exist in tolerance with others, to enjoy the fruits of a hard-won and fragile harmony, are now being openly challenged. And we are not alone: every country in the world today is facing this, alongside us. 

We need to deliberately create the safety we want to experience. In the face of its opposite - not just the hideous masks of terrorism, but the reactiveness of past responses. This is not going to go away. And it is not the same terror that was vanquished before. 

     Instead of mourning our lost safety, we must resiliently develop our strength. 

Strength is strength of mind, and will, not cowardice in the form of hate speech and violence. 

- Sunday Island 2019 -

Duty Of Care

A friend of mine recently had a very stressful and discouraging experience with an Elderly Care facility in which her father was placed. As medical treatment and access to food and nutrition improves, the population ages. The extended family structure of many Sri Lankan families has provided support for this ageing population, who are cared for at home by their adult children, often with the help of staff. 

My friend had carefully selected this home, and it is an expensive one which looked good and promised excellent care and support for its residents. However, during the stressful period of curfew and lockdown, when her father became ill, she found that the reality of the ‘care’ her father was receiving was very different from what it had appeared to be. 

She found when she visited her father that he had deteriorated very rapidly. In her words: 

“ I called an ambulance to take Daddy to hospital, but got there and found him blazing hot! He was delirious and his whole body was trembling uncontrollably. I asked for his temperature to be checked. The nurse did not know how to read the thermometer!! I took it from her and found he had 101 C! 

And they did not know ! They said the doctors had visited him this morning so I asked how come they didn’t notice he had high fever. 

I gave Daddy 2 panadols, cooled his head with eau de cologne, and my son carried him and made him comfortable. I stayed with him for an hour, talking to him, stroking his hands, giving him water, till he stopped the tremors and began to relax. Fed him some lunch with great difficulty, and before leaving, asked for his temperature to be checked again. This time the other ‘nurse’ did it . She too could not read the old fashioned thermometer they had. It had gone up to 102 C when I checked! I checked again. Still 102. 

His carers hadn’t a clue what to do. 

I asked for an ice cap. They pulled out Daddy’s woollen beanie!

These are “NURSES”?

Thank God they had ice, which I had them put in a plastic bag and wrap in a pillow case and place on his head. 

I told him I’d bring some ice cream and jelly for him in the evening . They don’t give him any special food like that, even though he finds it difficult to swallow. 

So many things are going through my mind. I feel angry, sad, frustrated, and helpless. I visited Daddy the day the curfew was lifted, and was utterly shocked to see how he had deteriorated. 

From being a man who was so alert, with a perfect memory and mentally so active, sitting in his wheelchair and surprising visitors with his sharp mind, to a skeletal, mumbling, frail and weak invalid who falls over when helped to sit up, all within just these past two months!

We searched the whole of Colombo and suburbs for months for the best Elders Home available, and picked this facility despite the premium rates they charge, because it was so well maintained, and claimed to provide 24 hour medical attention. It is owned and run by two doctors. 

Everything was initially fine: he was getting good food, was bathed every morning, and his room spotlessly clean. 

Then he suddenly fell ill, and within a week became unable to speak and wasn’t his usual self. The doctors told me his health was perfect and “he’s 98 years old so you have to accept this”. I could not accept that, and took him to a private hospital and a blood test confirmed that his thyroid levels had gone through the roof and he could’ve got into a coma or died! An adjustment to his thyroxine medication, and twice daily visits by me at mealtimes to feed him and ensure he had plenty of other nourishment brought him back to normal.

When I informed the doctors about their neglect, they responded by handing me a letter to remove Daddy from the facility! 

Then came the curfew and I was not allowed to visit Daddy. But I spoke with him frequently on the phone and he was doing fine. 

I was so frustrated at not being allowed to see him. They told me if I took him to hospital he would not be allowed back into the facility. 

I kept sending extra nourishment for him and the nurses kept telling me he was much better.

On Tuesday, as soon as curfew was lifted, I visited Daddy. And found him weak and skeletal and unfocused. 

Calls to the doctors met with them hanging up the phone and sending me a text giving me a June 5th deadline to remove Daddy from their Home! 

This is how these “Homes” are run. There are 2 young girls, not more than 20-21 years old, in nurses uniforms running the entire place. No Matron, no supervision. They do as they want! What happens if there’s a medical emergency? 

The two doctors (who own and run several of these “Homes for Elders”) apparently rarely go there. They just collect the huge fees they charge. 

Whilst I was there, Daddy asked for water and one of them poured water from a plastic mug into his open mouth whilst he lay flat on his back!!  I asked why they didn’t use a straw, and they said they didn’t have any! Daddy could easily have aspirated that water and developed pneumonia or got asphyxiated. 

My telephone call to the doctor was answered with: “We have asked you to remove your father from the Home so please do so” - and the phone was hung up, and my calls thereafter were cut off. 

This is how these heartless “doctors“ care for the helpless, elderly people in their care. 

I have not slept since seeing Daddy like that. I’m convinced he’s not even being fed or hydrated. He was covered with purple bruises. 

My heart aches for him. I wish I could bring him home and care for him myself. 

I will somehow find a way to do this. 

And I will do everything possible to get these money making houses of horror exposed and brought under some government regulations.”

As more families have two working parents, with young children to care for as well as jobs and professional careers, and the cost of living increases and wages do not increase in step with them, the care of our elderly family members is a real challenge for Sri Lankan society. 

Our parents and grandparents are at a vulnerable stage of their lives, having given their children all their resources and support to establish them in their own lives as well as they can. They deserve respect, dignity and protection in their final years. 

The Name Of The Game

 

At Law school, one of my lecturers wrote an academic paper called 'The Man In White Is Always Right'. It equated the Law with the game of cricket.

I grew up in a family which loved cricket, and to this day can watch a match on television from beginning to end with some knowledge and great enjoyment, following the changing tides of fortune of the competing teams. 

There are many great players to call upon, when thinking about the embodiment of cricketing ideals, conduct and standards. Name after name, face after face. Great matches, fantastic catches, the thrill of unexpected spills and dismissals, and rapid collapses of the batting lineup. Those strategic spin bowlers, those thunderous fast bowlers. The way the players move and act together, intuitively and imaginatively, in accordance with the conditions of the pitch and the situation. 

Some people - including my former professor - say that these one day matches, with the players in coloured uniforms blistered with logos representing sponsors, destroyed the great game. 

My favourite players include batsmen and bowlers from many countries and eras. But the person who I most admire as a player and personality is the great Donald Bradman. Others were fiery, dramatic, fierce or stylish, with sweep shots, wild flourishes and majestic sixes. But there was a consistency in Bradman’s performance that I found enormously reassuring. I only knew him as a legend, and saw archival footage of his great matches, but there was a focus and a concentration in his approach that made sense of the world to me, as I watched. 

I liked him because he always gave of his best, and had high personal standards of performance. No tantrums, spasms, self-indulgence or self-pity. Full accountability, and a commitment to self improvement. I have heard he did not endear himself to his team-mates because he did not buy them drinks after the matches or socialize with them off the pitch. He was no people pleaser. A private man; a reluctant public figure. 

Recently I was missing him, and the qualities he represents for me, so I looked him up on Wikipedia. And I found there a bar graph chart clocking his batting scores throughout his career. It was eye-opening. His consistency was remarkable. You could see his steady growth and his consolidation and extension past previous limits. You could see him, teaching as a player, testing himself, stretching himself and what he was capable of, increasing his personal territory. 

I resolve to print that bar graph out in colour and use it as a wall chart, like a vision board. The inspiration in the fluctuations remind me to look at the momentum built over time. To see how great records and lasting achievements are built. 

I am no mathematician, and most of the inspiration I found in my school lessons was in literature classes, but there was one moment in geometry class one life-changing day when the teacher was able to explain to me that a line was made of infinite individual dots. 

I actually saw it, in my mind’s eye: the line and the dots superimposed together, like a simultaneous double vision - not one or the other, alternating, but both at the same time. 

This is what the game of cricket, with its kaleidoscopic unfolding sequences, represents for me. Each game, test and match. The way the field and the formations of players are created to adjust in fine attunement with the player on the crease, who is ‘the still centre of the turning world’.

That characteristic style, so distinctive, developed by Bradman, was the result not of intermittent flash and dazzle but of day in and day out: hard yards, consistently well played. Those mighty scores, those double century averages, gave the spectators space and time to watch the lines of his mastery increase, point by point. 

The Quality Of Mercy

 

In Shakespeare’s play, ‘The Merchant Of Venice’, the lady Portia masquerades as a male lawyer, and makes a speech urging Shylock, a moneylender and a petitioner bent on vengeance, to be merciful in his attitude, in a legal case in which Shylock is attempting to regain what is rightfully his.

It’s a famous speech, one of the set pieces of Shakespearean drama. Portia speaks in exalted style about the divine attribute of the quality of mercy, which transcends and guides justice. It blesses the person who forgives as well as the one forgiven. 

The mutuality of this blessing embodies a Christian principle of human equality as sinners, expressed in the phrase: ‘...That in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, / And that same prayer doth teach us all to render/ The deeds of mercy’.  (The Merchant Of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1) 

This is a ‘big picture’ view, and appeals to the majoritarian view in Christian Venice at that time. But Shylock has a grievance, and it is not easy for a person who has been not only continually racially profiled, but discriminated against and defiled, to be merciful. A person who has unjustly been made to feel small finds it hard to be a ‘bigger person’, in word and deed. 

Indeed, even when he is legally granted the restoration of the money owed to him, Shylock seeks punishment for the man to whom he has lent money. This desire for retribution, over and above justice, leads to Shylock being excluded from the optimistic and comedic outcome of the play. His daughter informs on him and elopes with an unbeliever, and he loses a large part of the fortune he has amassed for the vindictiveness with which he pursued the life of his opponent, Antonio. 

Shylock has been insulted due to his minority status in an anti-Semitic City state, and reviled in word and deed by the boorish Christians who use his services. The temptation to even the scales is severe. 

From a spiritual perspective, Shylock’s attitude increases the negative attachment he has to this situation. He has the legal right to claim recompense and assert his rights. But the accumulated bitterness of years causes him to engage further, and demand that compensation be made to him for all the years of minority status. 

Whenever a person attaches so much significance to one case, one incident, or one relationship, we can see that they are setting themselves up for an ordeal. The complex challenges of life suggest to us that taking things lightly, staying on a factual, problem-solving level, is a good strategy for maintaining personal equilibrium. 

This requires self-evaluation, and self-restraint. The moral awareness required for the recalibration of the conflicted self in situations like this centres on foreseeability: that we see the negative impact that pursuing vengeance will have on ourselves, and so refrain. 

Punitive thinking affects the person who seeks to punish. Judgment is severe, and, in a moral sense, an act of violence.    It is engaged in by those seeking to make order out of the chaos of human conflict. Often those who have suffered greatly seek to find relief and closure in seeking redress. But to draw a personal line under a devastating incident is in effect an act of self-care. 

To extend that mercy to oneself is surely the best exit out of vengeance and into a greater and more lasting freedom. 

Pressure And Time

 

In the film Shawshank Redemption, the character Otis Redding, known as 'Red', and whose dialogue is spoken by Morgan Freeman, makes an assessment of his friend Andy Dufresne: 'Oh, Andy loved geology. I imagine it appealed to his meticulous nature. An ice age here, a million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure, and time. That's all it takes, really. Pressure, and time'.

That long-term perspective was what enabled Andy, a man derailed by unforeseen disaster, to tunnel out of a maximum security prison and escape to freedom that the others could not even imagine, and which he invites Red to share. It was faith not in religion but in his own resilience and in the creation of each positive act in the direction of his own liberation that sustained him throughout his ordeal. 

Andy was an oddity in that terrible place: he started a library, and commenced prisoner education classes, he offered financial advice to the guards and the warden, he played Italian opera over the PA system, he negotiated to get two beers apiece for his friends who were tarring the roof one summer day as part of prison detail, he did things that made the other prisoners feel free. 

To a mind such as his, time was linear. Actions added up and cumulatively generated momentum. But in the 19 years of his incarceration for a crime he had not committed, he had time to thoroughly consider the circular shape of karmic causality and consequence: cause and effect. And to free himself of its cycle of suffering. 

In his last conversation with Red, in the prison yard, before his escape, Andy comments that he killed his wife - not technically, because he did not pull the trigger of the gun which shot her - but because he inadvertently shut her out of his life, by being ‘a hard man to know... a closed book’. He left her alone, emotionally, and she looked outside the marriage for emotional response and affection, and this got her killed by a break and enter robber who was trying to rob the home of her lover, while she was there. 

By claiming responsibility on that deeper level, morally rather than legally, Andy restores his own status as a human being. He says, ‘Bad luck... floats around. Has to land on somebody... It was my turn, that was all. I was in the path of the tornado. I just had no idea that the storm would go on as long as it has’. 

Instead of blaming his wife, which many people would have done, for the adultery which incriminated him, Andy goes further and deeper, and acknowledges his co-creation of the problem, understanding that his wife, like all human beings, was seeking happiness - and could not be wholly blamed by him for that. 

This ‘no fault’ attitude frees him to act, even within the limits of the prison, and to actively seek both physical and intellectual pathways to freedom, while the rest of the convict cohort are paralyzed by the prison system and their own experience of being institutionalized. ‘Whatever mistakes I made, I paid for them, and then some’, Andy tells Red. He dares to dream big: to go to Mexico, to find and buy a small hotel, and fix a broken sailing boat and take his guests charter fishing. ‘It’s not too much to ask’, he says. It is truly an attitude ‘only a free man can feel’. 

That film came out in movie theatres 25 years ago. I still think the final scene, with the sweep shots of the Pacific Ocean, the visual embodiment of freedom, is one of the most satisfying in the history of cinema. It made full sense of all the suffering and anguish the characters had experienced, and gave them an earned and richly deserved reward. 

Andy tells Red in the prison yard that he thinks Red underestimates himself. Red had said he could not dream of the Pacific Ocean - ‘it would scare me, something that big’. But, in the voiceover for that closing scene, Red says: ‘I hope to make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope that the Pacific Ocean is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope’.

Our days are linear, but the seasons of the world are cyclical. With a geological perspective, we too can perhaps see how pressure and time operate to shape and direct our own actions. And with that knowledge, we could work even within the restrictions and limits of the material world, to make our seemingly improbable dreams come true. 

The Vanity Of Human Wishes

 

One of the greatest English writers of the 18th Century, Dr Samuel Johnson, wrote this poem as a survey of mankind. When the ‘A-list’ of writers of English Literature is outlined by people, whether to praise or blame, it is Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Jane Austen, and the Brontes most people know. And of course the Romantic poets. 

There is also poetry which is written from a satiric impulse which desires to offer a solution to the sorrows of human life. To attack the vice, and not the man in whom it resides. 

So here we have a poem which ought to be studied as a remedy for the  challenges of the world in which we live. It is unromantic, unsentimental, and it aims to act as a reality check to the excesses of belief and the delusions which plague us. This is not a poem which is limited by context, or can be considered ‘outdated’. There is no film version of it that would make students better understand what’s going on in its portrayal of the struggle of the human species. There is no way a summary or ‘translated’ version could really convey its purposes. 368 lines of iambic pentameter in rhymed couplets. The form of it is eloquent. 

‘Let Observation with extensive View, 

Survey Mankind from China to Peru 

Remark each anxious Toil, each eager Strife,

And watch the busy scenes of crowded Life.

Then see how Hope and Fear, Desire and Hate 

O’erspread with Snares the clouded Maze of Fate 

Where wavering Man, betrayed by venturous Pride 

To tread the dreary path without a guide 

As treacherous Phantoms in the mist delude 

Shuns fancied ills, or chases airy Good 

How rarely Reason guides the stubborn Choice; 

Rules the bold Hand or prompts the suppliant Voice’. 

It is not a viewpoint fuelled by class or gender struggle that Johnson illustrates. Its scope is broader than identity politics. It is the product of a culture in which people like himself could take a big picture view of the whole human struggle for survival and fulfillment. Individuals of the socio-political era  of his time are named, but we can actually substitute any appropriate name from our own era and context, because the factors of ambition, venality, ego and status anxiety remain constant and visible in human beings from age to age. 

This sort of observation is only possible for a person who is able to overcome the triggers and prompts which compel us to act in haste, in our judgments and decisions. When we step back, and observe the appeals to our senses and our beliefs, the temptations targeting our delusions, we can see how often people’s actions are motivated by self-interest. We see then how transient popularity and acclaim are; how foolish and misleading it is to trust or place our value in other people’s acceptance of us, or the constancy of their goodwill: 

‘Unnumbered Suppliants crowd Preferment’s gate 

Athirst for wealth, and burning to be great 

Delusive Fortunes hear the incessant call 

They mount, they shine, evaporate and fall ...

For now no more we trace in every line 

Heroic worth, benevolence divine’. 

This view of life is not very different from that put forward in religious scriptures, including those we consider to be sacred building blocks of our country. There is temporary flurry and there is lasting impact, and we must not mistake one for the other. 

This is not only ‘Celestial Wisdom’. It is practical. As Johnson asserts, in his heroic cumulative sequence, by choosing wisely and choosing well, based on reason, we can ‘make the happiness that we do not find’. 

Prima Facie - Profiles & Silhouettes

 We judge each other on first impressions and externals. Especially these days, in the era of optics and signalling and triggered judgmentalism. We shoot first, and ask questions afterwards. We mis-identify, and accuse others based on fear and not facts. 

We profile each other, we screen the world through pre-fabricated filters. Like the games we played in childhood - which wooden block fits into the corresponding shaped space? Which is the odd one out? What are the 12 differences between this picture and this one? How can we tell an enemy from a friend? 

People with fake online profiles infiltrate groups and pages and chats, with specific or generalized agendas: to create mayhem and incite hatred, or ‘for the lolz’. 

As shown in Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, about the witch burnings in Salem in North America, people start interpersonal conflict which escalated into systemic violence often for personal reasons: a petty grievance dressed up to look like a matter of social interest, requiring a public service announcement status. Hidden by policies of political correctness, hatred festers, semi-smothered and choked down. 

Two terms of a minority race President in modern North America, and the 45th incumbent signals that the hatred is ok. Hatred and dislike of certain categories of people are even modeled and rewarded and given official approval. ‘We have to protect what is of value. To the majority.’ God help you if you and yours fall outside the imposed demarcations of what will be respected and protected. 

We don’t often get close enough to really know anyone in the digitalised world, so this globalization of humanity is a mirrormaze. We fall back on what we know, our loyal band of followers, the true believers, our echo chamber compatriots. Our tribe. 

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, when the conspirators kill their former leader, although they have convinced themselves that they are patriots saving glorious Rome from tyrannical dictatorship, they have a bad optics moment. They are seen by the people standing over the dead body of murdered Caesar, covered in his blood. So many against one. 

It does not take long for Mark Antony to sway the people against them - in a brilliant utilization of rhetoric and leveraging of groupthink. Soon the bloodstained self-styled patriots are running for their lives. A tiny scene, one of the shortest in Shakespeare, shows a poet being ganged up on by a mob. His name is Cinna - the same name as one of the conspirators. But not the same man. He protests that he is not the person they are looking for, but his assertion is overpowered. He will do. He fits the profile. He is interrogated in the street, overpowered, and killed, in ACT III, Scene 3, of the play: 





It is too easy to make mistakes like this. To mis-speak, to mis-identify, to get the wrong man. Our emotions colour our assumptions, and if we utter them without thought or filter, and act on them without awareness or concern for the foreseeable consequence, we can make terrible and unrecoverable errors. 

A profile of someone is not only easily faked by someone creating it, it is also easily mis-read by those seeing it. 

Jumping to conclusions about others is what we do in haste and laziness and when we feel we have to make choices in a hurry. It is not a sport. It costs reputations, and it costs lives. We are being urged in these difficult times to be restrained and to be cautious. Every day, everyone of us has a choice in every situation in which we encounter another: to act on fear and vent our frustrations, or to offer the benefit of forbearance; to check our facts before sharing information, to check our privilege before making assumptions. 

To be sure that when we act, we do so with mindfulness, and not in anger, fear, dislike or hatred. 

Pyramid Schemes

 

There is a scene from the marvellous film ‘Elizabeth’ in which Cate Blanchett’s character Elizabeth I asks her advisor, Walsingham, played by Geoffrey Rush, advice on how to successfully perform the role of a great leader. He advises her to model herself on Mary, Mother of Jesus Christ, who was venerated, worshipped and idealized. Even though Catholicism was forcibly replaced by Protestant Christianity in Tudor England, devotion to the Queen of Heaven remained inbuilt in the populace. ‘They have found nothing to replace Her’, says Walsingham. Elizabeth I was one of the first monarchs to create a cult of personality around her own persona. 

‘The ordinary people must be able to touch the divine here, on Earth’, Walsingham says. 

King Ramses II of Ancient Egypt understood this well. Many statues of him, handsome and muscled, with the seal of rulership on his strong hand, are found all over Egypt. I was told by a guide there, when I asked if he had really looked like that: ‘Even if he did not, he would have been represented like this, because this was the ideal male body, face and stance of the time’. The statues were like multiple selfies, made of stone, built to last. 

At the top of every multi-level structure is an apex personality, a person who is the cynosure of all eyes: the charismatic, high vibration embodiment of the ideal, the public face of the brand. 

And speaking of faces, there is a Golden Ratio which defines beauty, which  identifies that people with symmetrical facial features have mass appeal. It’s the Look people aspire to. To be able to access the divine in their daily lives. Film stars, rock stars and actors all come down to earth from heaven for brief appearances and give audiences and hold court, just as the kings and queens did in the ancient days, when they were born into that ascendancy, or were heirs and scions of families who had won to the apex of their societal structure by combat, conquest and acquisition. 

Pyramid schemes are named this way because, at the summit, the king whose tomb lies within the structure is literally supported by the labour of the masses at the base. Investigations are currently ongoing into several pyramid schemes - now called multi-level marketing, or MLMs - which are unsustainable because of their inevitably inherent inequity, despite the pleasing appearance of their form and structure. 

The people who are invited to join these schemes invest their own money and also are required to bring in clientele from amongst the community of their family and friends. The monetisation of personal support relationships is an unhappy foundation for trust and affection. 

In democracies, paradoxically, these elitist models of wealth creation thrive, just as in America the Kennedys built the new ‘Camelot’, which seems to now have perished with the unexpected death of John Junior, JFK’s heir apparent. People who generally fiercely defend equal rights and often describe themselves as ‘self-made’, idolized ‘England’s Rose’, Diana Princess of Wales, and noticeably invest in being part of the first circle of corporate, filmic, theatrical, musical or operatic ‘royalty’, cultivating their associations with these blessed shining ones. 

The English Romantic poet Shelley, in his poem ‘Ozymandias’, prophesied the decline of these dreams of power and influence. In the famous sonnet, a traveller to an ancient, ‘antique’, land finds the broken parts of a once colossal statue of a long-forgotten king: 

“...Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 

Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand, 

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 

Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things, 

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.”

The inversions of expectation in the phrase showing the pairing of the hand with mockery instead of generosity and the heart that feeds on the people’s energy and devotion, instead of caring for them and nurturing them, portray a self-serving tyrant. Also a man with delusions of grandeur: 

“And on the pedestal, these words appear: 

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; 

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The ironic transience of the power yearned for and wielded by the ancient all-powerful king is a master class in realism. The mighty works of carved stone have toppled and been eroded by time and the weather. Carved stone gets ground down into grains of sand, just as the beautiful bones of a symmetrical face and shapely body unpreventably  disintegrate through the passing of time. Structures fall into disuse and disrepair. The iconic figure of the God King eventually presided over a desolate and bare terrain. 

Nothing human is set in stone. 

Sour Grapes On Mezze Plates

Every year, niche magazines of various kinds publish a top 30 or 40 or 50 list of high achievers, deemed worthy of public recognition. The most beautiful, the wealthiest, the most successful. For several years, there has been a trend of identifying young success stories: ‘30 under 30’, ‘40 under 40’ and so on, and the young entrepreneurs who are creating startups and seeking to change the world in their 20s and 30s are being showcased. 

This recognition inevitably brings forth criticism - about the social injustice and inequity innate in a society where privileged and (it is assumed) talentless people are elevated over their peers, simply due to the accident of birth, and as the result of no effort of their own. Such a mentality on the part of the observers of these lists - their comments made publicly in the comments section of the magazines which publish these lists, and ubiquitously on social media - find it difficult to acknowledge any one else’s talent or skill, unless it fits a populist ‘hard luck’ or ‘hustle’ narrative, or a life arc that resonates with and affirms their own. 

Many people feel compelled to question the credentials of those awarded, possibly partly due to a public-spirited desire to uphold high standards of professionalism, and make sure the recipients of the accolades are worthy; but also (one might observe at times) from personal rancor, and a feeling of being affronted by the unearned success of others: sour grapes and a grudging feeling of ‘what about me? It isn’t fair. I want my share’. 

In a materialistic and capitalistic society, competitive comparisons are inevitable, as resources and benefits, including public acclaim, are perceived as limited. This is true of every group of human beings who have ever been congregated in a competitive mass. 

Jonathan Swift, in his early thirties 300 years ago, observed this phenomenon, in A Tale Of A Tub: 

‘Whoever has an ambition to be heard in a crowd must press, and squeeze, and thrust, and climb with indefatigable pains, till he has exalted himself to a certain degree of altitude above them. Now, in all assemblies, though you wedge them ever so close, we may observe this peculiar property, that over their heads their is room enough; but how to reach it is the difficult point, it being as hard to get quit of number as of hell’. 

Swift then quotes from Virgil’s Aeneid: 

‘Evadere ad auras, Hoc opus, hic labor est’. Translated, this means: ‘The way downwards is easy, but to retrace your steps into heaven’s air, there is the trouble, there is the toil’. 

Many magazines and institutions and organizations which award these prizes and awards for achievement play on the human desire to excel, an evolutionary urge at its most primal. With titles evoking the multi-level strata of the feudal social hierarchy itself, they endorse the belief that amongst the Fortune 500 is the best place to be. 

And, like multi-level structures from Utah to Udaipur, they evangelize the ideal of unremitting effort, and ceaseless ‘trouble and toil’, by which an individual becomes ‘worthy’ of such emplacement. 

This hustle narrative is of course only really true in a society where all individuals are on an equal footing and have equal access to resources. Hard work alone does not hoist a person to the apex of the pyramid structure. And this is where community support and social engineering come in, often entirely unacknowledged by the judges and the award nominees: the backing of parents, patrons and investors, not only financially, in terms of trust funds set up by parents and grandparents, but in terms of less visible social capital - introductions, alliances  and connections. 

And this is also what makes talented and under-resourced people so

bitter. How do we compare the achievements of people who are so differently resourced? It is a false statement to describe a ‘30 under 30’ who has access to substantial support and opportunity gained via their family connections as a ‘self-made’ person. How can a comparatively unresourced person compete, or hope to even be in the running, with such inherent inequity being disguised from the public? The numbing notion of the closed circle of fortune and fame is thus enforced, in the glossy pages and the exclusive spaces reserved for the privileged in perpetuity. 

People are now calling for a disclosure of assets by the nominees for awards such as these, so that such inequities, operating to disadvantage some, can be seen for what they are.  

Talent does not discriminate, and grit and a strong work ethic are not limited to the relatively dispossessed. It could be argued actually that those who are propped up and cushioned by family wealth and connections are more likely to be weak, spineless, untalented and lacking in resilience and survival skills, never having had to earn their own living or balance a budget. Studies of wealthy families over three generations show that getting is not the same as keeping and consolidating. Just as it is easier to fall than to rise, in the Virgil quotation, it is easier to spend than to earn or hold onto wealth. So, in fact, unearned wealth is only a temporary asset. 

In the race of life, the climbing of the mountain of our individual aspiration, we can trust that everything we contain within our character will be challenged and tested by life’s events. We can even the odds, adjusting as we go. And the resentment and the rage, which people in a society where few are perceived as privileged often express, at the unjust distribution of resources which has hampered and blocked their progress, does not take into account that it is not what we inherit but what we create, that makes us.