On the way from Atticus’ school to Jon’s class today, Jon and Taborok were driving by a construction site and saw a fight break out between a woman worker and a man worker. Her job is likely a brick breaker, which means she sits all day in the hot sun and breaks up bricks into small pieces with a little hammer because her wages are so absurdly low that it is cheaper to have her, and hundreds like her, do it rather than to use a machine. Why are her wages so low? Because she has no power- she is a poor woman in Bangladesh that is “lucky” to have a job that buys even a third of the rice she’ll eat in a day.
So she and the man were yelling at one another and making threatening gestures. At some point the woman picked up a brick and threatened to hit the man (after he had raised his hoe thingy at her). She backed down though, just as Jon passed, and she didn’t follow through with the threat. Moments later Jon heard a thud, and turned back, and she was on the ground, apparently unconscious (hopefully not dead). Jon, naturally outraged to have seen a woman just beaten publicly and concerned for her safety, told a nearby cop that he needed to go over there. The cop clearly didn’t give a crap, and even said “There’s not a problem” even though he was clearly aware of what had just happened (and was in fact chuckling a bit about it). He was basically a lazy, sexist and classist jerk and didn’t feel like she was worth his time (big surprise!).
It was upsetting on so many levels, but what really was Jon going to do? It was over anyway, so he went on his way. Shortly thereafter, while having tea with Taborok at the tea-stall near his Bangla school, Jon’s zipper on the pocket where he keeps his wallet got stuck. Within no time, five or more people were helping tug and manipulate the shorts to help Jon get his zipper undone. (In retrospect, one guy had his hand pretty far up Jon’s shorts, but by then it was really only about getting the zipper fixed- Jon as an actual individual and his upper thigh boundaries, were inconsequential!) The zipper was fixed, and all was well. Jon quietly considered how many people fell over themselves to help him, a white (aka powerful) man with an inconvenience, while nobody seemed to think that poor brick breaking woman who made the mistake of talking back to some man on the job and had got herself knocked unconscious needed help. There weren’t people falling over themselves to help her. She isn’t important; she is barely even visible. Yet Jon is both highly visible and, as a result, highly important. Again, privilege and power kick your ass when you look at it. The injustice of it all was overwhelming.
So this was the day Jon was coming off of when he got home, and he needed some escapism. Sometimes, overwhelming days in Bangladesh just need to be veg’d out. In our case, that vegging comes in the form of the complete dvd series (minus season 6 which is airing in the US now) of LOST. This isn’t really a show we’d watch in the US, but here, it is completely comforting. It is escapism at the pinnacle – the people are on a freaking magical island for God’s sake! It doesn’t matter if the show is good, or if it is well played or even makes any damned sense (which it generally doesn’t) – it isn’t HERE. Nothing relates to here. Nobody we know here watches it, nothing culturally translates, and it isn’t, frankly, worth talking about beyond the confines of the hour long show itself. So when we are overwhelmed with what has been termed “cultural fatigue,” – we get LOST.
Only sometimes it isn’t even that easy. On this particularly overwhelming day, all Jon wanted was to get his mind out of the place- to go into the vegetative place of tv land. We can’t watch LOST when Atticus is around (for one it is too scary and for two we don’t really watch tv when we ought to be parenting…) so the timing is already limited, but just as we are about to pop it in and relax- the power goes out. AARGH!
Now that the hot season is here, the power is awful. It goes out at least four or five times a day, usually for an hour or more. We have a building generator that runs a few fans and a few lights, but not all things. Sam, however, noticed the other night that one electrical outlet in our bedroom was running on the generator. Being the problem solver she is, she devised the plan to string plug adapters from the bedroom into the living room to the tv. We then plugged the tv and dvd into the closest adaptor. HA! HAHAHA! Victory! We watched LOST during the power outage. Take that!
Now, we aren’t proud of this, really, Sure, we should have used the power outage to have some sort of meaningful conversation, or read a book, or do work, or stare lovingly into one another’s eyes, but frankly, we weren’t in the mood. We just wanted to escape; we just wanted to watch the stupid tv when we wanted to watch it and Bangladesh wasn’t going to let us- but we won.
We haven’t told Atticus about this, and probably won’t. We prefer the power outages as forced digital free times for our family, but today, it was a much needed victory in terms of tiny acts of resistance.
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