But I wasn't the only one. There were lots of people waiting outside the rolling, garage-type doors that were still closed. Most of the doors are just like horizontal bars so you can see what is going on inside. I expected to see people stocking shelves or mopping floors or readying the place for the customers. I was amazed by what I saw instead. Easily 100 employees lined up across the entire width of the store from entrance to entrance at the checkout counter floor standing there listening to some young, thin dudes. One was wearing a hip hop style oversized, flat brimmed ball cap, a tight tanktop and some kind of wrist scarf thingy. If he wasn't gay I'm Bill Gates. You know when you hear someone speaking a language and even though you may only understand one of every ten words, you can tell he's gay? There's regional accents, linguistic accents and then there's the gay accent. And intonation and exaggeratedly effeminate gesticulation. Anyway, I really didn't need the last four lines. I could have just said, he, and his cohorts, were aerobics instructors. There they were readying the troops for their morning dancing. A one and a two and a "players gonna play play play play and haters gonna hate hate hate hate, shake it off, I shake it off!" And almost all the hundred or so employees danced right along with these thin but muscly dance leaders. It wouldn't have been such a sight, I don't think, if it weren't for the hijabs. About 2/3 of the female employees were wearing the Lotte uniform and their Muslim headware and they were dancing right along with Taylor Swift and the Lotte wake-up beatboys.
While in Korea and Japan I had seen the morning rituals such as these designed not just to wake up the employees and get the blood flowing in the ones who stayed up too late or might be hungover. It's a sort of company membership exercise in which you can show your loyalty and probably be rewarded for doing so. But never with the hijab. I had heard that music and dancing were frowned upon by the religion of Islam. That they were idle pursuits. But there these gals were not just dancing but mouthing the words to the song as well. Having fun! And I enjoyed watching them.
On a similar note, today while walking home from teaching Ah In and Jooh Ah, I saw something even MORE shocking! I was going up a flight of stairs to get into the mall which my apartment is attached to and coming down the stairs was a young, Muslim chick with what I thought was an ingenius use for her hijab. She had her cell phone tucked into it and was blabbing away to someone totally hands free! Like this:
My point is I like to see people who believe in God. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I think even my atheist friends would agree. It's when you get dogmatic leaders who think that any variance, no matter how slight, in the religious routines is deterioration rather than adaptation. Those are the extremist creators. Those are the people who give religions bad names. People change. Times change. Cultures change. EVERYthing changes. Why can't religions change too? Well, they can. Do you know how even MORE messed up our world would be if all religions practiced the laws of their respective churches without ever changing? Here's an example: Football would be a different game. Christians are forbidden from eating or touching the flesh of pigs. Can't touch the pigskin. No post T.D. point to the heavens. Those guys would be playing some other sport. No kneeling in the endzone for a quick prayer after scoring either. No locker room pre-game prayer. No Teebowing! Hockey would be different too. There was a time when a mullet haircut was known as "hockey hair." But Christians are technically not supposed to round off the side growth of their hair. Whatever the heck that means. As I often am, I am reminded of the Simpsons. The episode where Burns hired major league ball players to play in the company softball game vs. Shelbyville. Burns keeps telling Don Mattingly he looks like a hippy and to get rid of his sideburns. Mattingly shaves both sides of his head but it still doesn't satisfy Burns so he kicks him off the team. Remember that one?
At any rate, there are crazy, old laws and rules in practically every religion. I'm glad the Muslims of Indonesia are not all dwelling in the distant past like some extremist would like them to. I'm glad, even though we can't see if they have "hella good hair" under their hijabs, at least those Muslim gals can shake shake shake shake it off, shake it off.
So anyhoo, the doors opened and most of the workers stayed at the front of the aisles. I went in the door by electronics so I had to go all the way across the store to get to the food. EVERY person said, "Salamat pagi," to me! Some bowed extra politely, most smiled. I was saying, "Salamat pagi. Salamat pagi. Good morning. Yeap pagi. Pagi. Pagi. Selamat pagi. Pagi...AAARRGGGHhh!" I just turned down any aisle so I could give these greeters the, ahem, shake. I headed for the beginning of the food. By coincidence, not design, the beer section is at the beginning of the food aisles to that's where I went first. I needed water and beer. But the beer was gone! Water was still there but the beer was gone! So I asked one of the freshly exercised, extraordinarily friendly workers in Indonesian where the beer was. She gave me directions to where I had just come from. I told her in Indonesian that there was no beer there. And, of course, we went to the beer section, which still had no beer and she was as confused as I. So she then said to me that there was no beer. They were fresh out. I had been in the store the day before and there was plenty. I knew they weren't out. She was just not into helping me as much as getting rid of me.
So I started thinking as I thanked her and continued on, that I had heard something about beer being removed from convenience stores like 7-11's and Indomaret and Alphamarts. Maybe this rule was being enforced in Lotte Marts too. But that turned out NOT to be the case. As I searched for a check-out till I saw the beer near the entrance at the spot where the huge line-up for cigarettes was. Indonesians are serious about their smoking. A cigarette company is the richest Indonesian owned company I think. You look around on the streets and you won't look long before you find someone crouched under a tree fiendishly enjoying a smoke. Or some old guys sitting at the table outside 7-11 sucking on some cigs. Their love for alcohol has been slower to develop, however, being unclean in the Muslim religion. But maybe now that it will be more closely associated with cigarettes it might encourage a little extra-religious experimentation. Probably not but maybe.
Anyhoo, where was I going with this? I got my groceries and got some beer and went home. Then I started to think a bit about history. Should we just forget it and move on, remember it and learn from it, or dwell in it? Then I got to thinking about what we have been conditioned by the media to label all willy nilly like, without checking our history, as "terrorism." Should we be calling the people we call terrorists "terrorists?" Or would that change if we threw a little historical perspective into the mix? In fact it's not always "history," I'd say in a lot of cases it's just, "a history," that would change the label somewhat. Maybe to "avengers" or "lynch mobs" or "insurrection squads" or something that still sounds bad but not totally evil. Because, let's face it, if your country was invaded by, let's say Canada, (ha ha), and the Canadians killed your family for no reason other than economics and extraction of natural resources that are the rightful property of the people of your country... then years later, even a generation or two later, you went to Canada, climbed out onto the edge of the CN Tower in Toronto and started throwing handfuls of change, (because you've been in Canada for a week now and you have about three tons of it), which accellerates to massive speeds before hitting innocent Canadians below killing them, would you be called a "terrorist?" You bet your ass you would! By Canadians and Canadian allies. But would you be? Are you committing a completely unprovoked act of violence? Terrorism?
Let me just say, I know you can't kill people that way, it's an old wivestale. It was, what I thought would be a poetic way to kill Canadians. I'd make a bad terrorist, what can I say?
Anyway, first, (and of course by "first" I mean after they killed you), the Canadian authorities and government would find out where you're from. "He's from Lupshevnia? Didn't we kill about a million people there for their shlubodinium deposits? Oh, that's right, 1.5 million. Oh it's coming back to me now. Shlubodinium is highly explosive. We didn't want to risk our expensive machinery and no normal miners would mine the stuff so we forced the Lupshevnians to extract it. The ones we didn't exterminate." Then the damage control begins. "Hello, media? I'll be your best friend if you don't run any references to the Canadian genocide in Lupshevnia for a little while. Oh, all right, I'll give you a million dollars." "Hello, America? I'll be your friend if you help us make an emotional stand against, just a sec... What are we making a stand against? Oh yeah... and emotional rally in support of the railroads of Canada." "No? Oh, all right I'll give you a billion dollars. Great! See you Thursday." "Okay, we'll put the story out that this crazed lunatic, with no provocation or justification, killed Canadians from the CN Tower to protest the CN, (Canadian National), railroad because there were some... what religion was he? Oh yeah... some 7th Day Adventists who worked on the railroad and were mistreated. Then on Thursday we'll get some fellow politicians and pay a handful of local bystanders to have a rally in support of the unification that came through joining the great people of this great country via the construction of the Canadian National Railroad. That oughta do it."
You might think this sort of thing doesn't actually happen, that I'm having a laugh and exaggerating here, but what do we know about the Charlie Hebdo killings? CH was a magazine that printed cartoons and articles mocking the Muslim religion. The "terrorists" were Muslim. Well it must be totally about religion then. Case closed. Religion all on its own is responsible for yet another attrocity in the world. I saw roundtables at the time on the BBC of supposedly smart fellows virtually parrotting this very line of reason. It was momentarily brought up that maybe, just maybe something in French foreign relations and foreign policies might have something to do with this event and the roundtable just said, "Nope. Absolutely impossible. Let's move on." And nobody but me smelled a rat. I was, I admit, wondering if the tragedy could have anything to do with French foreign interests before I saw the roundtable discussion but when these "experts" all agreed French international relations had nothing whatsoever to do with this event, about the only thing they agreed so absolutely about in the whole show, my bullshit metter was red lining.
I made the mistake of bringing it up with some of my atheist friends but was seen as a wet blanket thrown over the roaring fire of anti-religious rhetoric that was gaining ground worldwide at the time. Many people out there wanted religion, or more specifically, Islam, to be the culprit. So much so that it was easy for many important reasons behind the killing of the 17 CH employees to go with the shooters to their graves. There were a couple of things that were mentioned I thought without any of the gravity and "HEY-LISTEN-TO-THIS" that I thought they warranted. The major one was the nationality of the brothers. They were Algerian. At least that's where their parents were from. Look at the history between France and Algeria and you will see terrorism. You will see torture, attrocities, beheadings, attempted genocide, slavery, all of these things we hate committed by the French against the people of Algeria. Why? They just decided to move on into the country and use the land for cotton fields either killing the residents or forcing them to work the fields. This was not a million years ago either! 1830. There are records written by the French generals of the time talking about the only good "Arab," (as they called them), being a dead Arab. One guy said any French soldier who doesn't use the edge of his sword on every filthy Arab he sees will get the flat side of my sword. I'm paraphrasing but something like that. I read about the French trying to force the Muslims to renounce their faith or die. I even saw pictures of French attrocities against the Algerians. THIS, my friends, all done for cotton, the oil of the day, THIS was terrorism. I saw lots of information about how awful the French were to the Algerians during their struggle for independance from the French. I read that the number of people killed was somewhere between 350,000, (a number, not surprisingly, that the French accept as correct), and 1.2 million. Somewhere in between is the probable total but whatever it is, it's a far cry from 17! I read and I wondered... with all those people slaughtered, beheaded, enslaved, tortured, forced to renounce their religion and who knows what else, is it possible for any family from Algeria to have escaped the attrocities of the French altogether? Could any family make the claim that they have no relatives or loved ones that were harmed in any way by the French? I doubted it. Then I thought of the Charlie Hebdo killers. Do you suppose their parents had no stories to tell them about the French attrocities at that time?
I don't think that religion was just incidental and that the CH cartoons had nothing to do with it and that the CH attackers were not wrong for so many reasons for doing what they did, but I re-evaluated the term "terrorist," a little bit. Then I thought about the link to Al-Qaeda's branch in Yemen. The fact is this whole thing was reportedly financed by a guy I have written about here before, who was imprisoned for 18 months without a charge, hearing, or any proper due process, radicalized by long-term solitary confinement and after release and involvement with Al-Qaeda in Yemen he was drone bombed again without a charge, a trial or any proof of anything. These are the things that create the mentality in extremist groups, along with personal experiences that are similar, that allow them to do such dispicable acts. The thing about most, "terrorists," is they are killed before the world gets to find out their list of motivations. Not a coincidence, that.
I think history, and past events too recent to be called history yet, should be studied and people should be made aware of the terrorism, the ACTUAL terrorism that has been routinely committed in the past, (and continues in the present), by rich countries against less powerful countries for their natural resources and we need to understand how that translates into the extremist actions that are erroneously called "terrorism." It plays no small part and it would seem almost too obvious to state but if we could put a stop to economic terrorism, which is more wide spread and dangerous than we know, these attrocities committed against rich countries that are immediately labeled as "terrorism" just might come to a stop as well. Too often, I believe, acts of violence are blamed on religion by the people who committed them or people who dislike religion and are readily convinced of its culpability. I'm not saying it never happens. Relax. What I'm saying is I wish we could get at all the causes of what we call "terrorism" nowadays and put a stop to them.
I bring it up because I am still seeing people talking about the Charlie Hebdo incident. Saying how religion is the enemy of freedom of speech. Yes, religion is part of some terrorism. Yes religion can limit freedom of speech. But sometimes I think we should try to concentrate on some of the many issues besides religion and freedom of speech involved in acts of extremism and terrorism around the world. Like shut up about freedom of speech already! We get you! (ar ar)
The Kenyan slaughter of 148 people at Garissa University: Yes, there were people asked if they are Christian and shot because of it so religion is definitely part of it but I really hope the authorities search for all the motivations. Al Shabaab are undoubtedly influenced by recent and historical violence in Somalia and the wide variety of areas the members come from too. Are they motivated solely by religion? Like did all the members find themselves reading the Koran one day then suddenly decide they need to commit extreme acts of violence? It seems to me there might be a step or two in between that turns them into such violent people. But violent people can sometimes be convinced to stop violent behaviour. Even after long traditions of it.
And if you say it could never happen, that people will never forget history, never move on or progress with the times, take a look at the top of this post. It can happen. It happens all the time actually. I think there are some people who just need some very VERY strong encouragement to change. And don't kid yourself, the people motivated by money and greed are the ones who will need the stronger encouregement. You can take THAT to the bank.
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