Do I Have a Shot at Having a Loving Relationship?
So I wake up one fine morning. And as with all waking ups on one fine mornings, to find something unusual, I find a new application on my smartphone — Ask the Indian Chief Anything.
You touch the app, and as with Aladdin, an Indian appears. A dead Indian becomes alive.
Apparently, as the name goes, you can ask anything. I go with what has been most on my mind.
- “Do I have a shot at having a loving relationship?”
- “What is your relationship with the natural world?”
- “Natural world?”
- “Yes… it’s English, right?”
Whoa! That’s cheeky. Sounds like a real Indian application.
- “Yes, I understand the semantics… but we are sitting on 35th floor in a New York apartment. What natural world do you expect here?” I submit.”
- “So you don’t have any natural world here?”
- “Evidently so! This is not an Indian reserve, after all!”
- “Alright, then what’s your relationship with the animal world?”
- “Why do you guys always have to make things sound so heavy? And stop trying to show me down! We don’t have any animal world here either. But yes, if you could simply ask about “animals”, then yes, I love animals.”
- “You mean your domesticated slaves, right?”
- “What do you mean?”
- “Tethered, chained, crated, caged, penned, enclosed, batteried… tortured, maimed, castrated, neutered, spayed…”
- “Yes, yes, yes, I get it.”
- “At your service eternally, loving you back unconditionally…”
- “I said I got it, you don’t have to go on. Besides I am a vegan you should know. I don’t eat meat. And believe me, I really love animals.”
- “So is it normal for you to exterminate those you love?”
- “What do you mean?”
- “You slaughter wild animals to eat your domesticated plants, isn’t it?”
- “I don’t get it.”
- “Please don’t tell me you don’t even know where your food comes from.”
- “Why don’t you tell me?”
- “You clear forests to grow your food on farmlands, right?”
- “Obviously, yes.”
- “So you annihilate the forest, and billions and billions of living beings that live within, to grow your exclusive vegetarian food — your slave plants — exclusively for you.”
- “Yes, yes go on…”
- “It’s actually you who’s adamant on going on. And in this adamancy to go on, please let me know how many forests you have spared on the planet.”
- “I asked you a simple question — Do I have a shot at having a loving relationship? And frankly, I really don’t know where you are going with all that.”
- “If it were a simple question, you would have known the answer yourself, no?”
- “Alright, but still, you are on a trip of your own. Why don’t you come to the point?”
- “The point is, in this web of life, do you have a relationship with anything? If yes, then what is the nature of that relationship?”
- “Well, that’s a complex question.”
- “I’ll simplify. Do you love your car?”
- “Oh yes, that baby is my darling!”
- “Are you attached to your smartphone?”
- “All the time. But how is all that even remotely connected to my having a romantic relationship with a woman?”
- “You like women?”
- “I love them.” Here comes a damn awkward pause, but I continue, “That goes without saying, isn’t it?”
- “But a woman is a living being.”
- “So?”
- “You do not know how to enter into a relationship with a living being. All your learning contradicts that.”
- “But I really do respect women.”
- “You have no respect for life itself. How can you have respect for a living being?”
- “Please expound.”
- “Wherever you discover life, you destroy it. Wherever you discover a living being, you either enslave or eliminate.”
- “I don’t agree.”
- “Look at your zoos, your farms, your factory farms… your cities, you towns, your homes… vegetal or animal, wherever you discover a living being, you either domesticate, that is enslave, or eliminate.
The only relationship you have learnt so far is that of control, subjugation and manipulation. Whatever is permissible, must be of servitude to you.”
- “Expound more.”
- “You are afraid of the wild. And love is a wild thing. Wildest of all, life can offer.”
- “Wait, I need a glass of water.”
- “What, you drink water from a bottle?”
- “Yes, what is wrong with it?”
- “But where have your rivers gone?”
- “We are civilized people, Mister. We drink from bottles, not rivers.”
- “But, if you cannot have a relationship with a river, you cannot have a relationship with a woman.”
- “Well, that’s news to me. But we still cannot drink from rivers. Rivers are polluted. Even fish cannot drink from there, forget us humans.”
- “Must you kill all that flows?”
- “What do you mean?”
- “Evidently, you cannot tolerate what flows. You must control it; dam it, pollute it and then kill it. Isn’t it the same what you do to love?
You must control it; dam it, pollute it and then kill it. Isn’t it?
And then you wonder what happens to your marriages.
How is it even possible, to dismember yourself from the rest of the creation, and expect to drink from one person, what flows from the whole of the creation?”
- “I am afraid, I’m losing you here.”
- “Of course, you are, in the process of losing everything. That’s how the story of your culture culminates.
You began your story with — This is my piece of land.
You came into existence out of the land’s love for you. Subjugating the loving, snatching what was already yours, controlling what was already flowing for you; scheming of owning what you are born of; commodifying what gives life to everything, you laid the foundation of all your relationships.
The premise of your story is owning and trading.
The semantics of your relationship is abuse, dominance, exploitation and manipulation.
What can be owned cannot be alive. What is not alive can be used, abused and traded — is your syllogism.
Everything can be owned. Love is a transaction. Everything is to be owned — is your praxis and wisdom.
Your first lesson in relationships has been — taking by force — not receiving what is given in love.
You began your story with one word, and you have compulsively written all over your book, just one word — rape.
Your second lesson in relationships has been — commodifying by transactions — not giving or accepting in an exchange of love.
All your learning is about acquiring the skills to mask these, molding you into a sophisticated lie.
Your institutions are a mask. Your civility is a mask. Your love is a mask.
Your culture is a mass manufacturing of masks.
You have methodically destroyed everyone and everything on the other end of relationships — to prey on them.
You are a systemic loner on earth, dreaming of being a lover.
So far, all that you have learnt about life is to destroy it. The only relationships you seem to be capable of having are with simulated life, not life.
Of only preserving the pretense of life in death, not life.
Tell me, what shot do you have at having a loving relationship?”
Bloody Indians! They are a pain when alive, an even bigger pain when dead! I need some beer now, and there goes this app to the garbage bin. Tinder rocks!
