Rubber Soul, 4/25

Our culture is so consumer oriented that if everyone in the world consumed at the rate Americans do we would need 5 worlds. Dr. Rog made the comment that people in the East sit in front of Buddha to find spiritual peace, but the Westerners idea of accomplishing spiritual peace involves going to the store and buying a Buddha. This just goes to show how Western society longs for pleasure through an exotic lense, yet our idea of the Other is merely a commodified version. Something easily bought and sold, like a website for ordering exotic brides. We've gone as far as commodifying human beings, and if we can ignore the fact that people are more than objects of lust, then where does it end? Our imperialistic visions have become so narrowly focused that we've resorted to conquering bodies of people just like we conquer land and bodies of water. Sexual domination over a person of a different ethnicity is viewed as erotic and getting in touch with your more primitive sense of being. The stigma is that the "Others" are more primitive than the mainstream "white bread" Western culture. We think that they are more in tune with their basic desires, and that sexual pleasure is at a more heightened level. Just today I had a discussion about the AIDS crisis in Africa. Someone said that AIDS is so rampant there because the people are so primitive and the disease spreads quicker because Africans are more sexually active. While I don't know the statistics on that particular topic, I argued that there was more to the story than that. AIDS awareness and safe sexual practices are not being taught enough over there. Dismissing the AIDS issue as a cause of Africans being highly sexual does not explain the reality of the situation. We need to consider human beings as equals rather than thinking of Others as being more or less animalistic.