I love it, I hate it too

This is the story of R. The other day I an R were talking when American aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan came up in our debate. Now we both consider politics as something beyond resurrection, so we prefer talking about us rather than finding meaning to what the biggies do. Soon R said, “I don’t like what US does, I mean, it does whatever it likes,” (US is an “it” for us) “bomb anything, kill anyone, and that too for bullshitty reasons.”
“Right”, I said.
Five seconds of silence and R speaks again “But somehow I also admire US. It can do what it likes.”

Uh-huh, now that was catchy. He liked and don’t-liked US for exactly the same reason!!! How could that be?

R is a weak person, small in stature and timid in nature. His closest friends are not the one’s who look up to him but the one’s that he looks up to. He’s not very assertive in personal life and usually puts his own interests at the bottom of the interest stack.

Well…it’s not a very difficult thing to see that there might be times when such a person finds himself neglected by people around him despite his goodness freely oozing out non-stop like a fresh water spring. This injustice puts him in a perfect place to empathize with anyone who suffers, including the Afghans and the Iraqis. And if you empathize with these guys, no doubt you don’t like US. He’s basically a child who wishes there could be more justice in the world just the way he perceived when he was an infant in the arms of his mother.

Of course he’s not in his mother’s arms anymore and he gotta survive in this world which is definitely not fair. The survival requires him to be strong; but he feels some kinda insufficiency of this strength. Clearly it makes him admire someone who has this strength, just like he admired his father as a kid—his father who was all powerful and could fix any shitty situation (at least that’s what he perceived). Time has changed, he’s grown up into a young man, his father is an oldie looking at him to make important decisions of the family…but the child still admires power and authority and that’s what US displays.

Tough Armors and Weak Bodies

As always I was late. I boarded the company bus at the last minute. All seats were already occupied. I was relieved to see that I wasn’t the only one who will make the half an hour journey standing in the bus. I saw a girl standing near the door talking to another female sitting on the first row of seats. “Some how these girls always stick together” I mused (Fellowships).

I looked around. There were several guys sitting in the bus. I wondered what would I have done had I been sitting—guess I would have offered her my seat. I took a quick glance at her whole body—she was about 5’4”, slim built, somewhat beautiful, surely desirable, but most certainly very capable of enduring half an hour of standing.

A guy sat by the window next to the female our desirable girl was talking to. He was looking outside the window. Now I knew if I were him I would have offered the girl my seat. But somehow this guy was untouched by such chauvinistic spikes I always failed to resist. Did he feel any guilt? Did he feel ashamed of not doing what people expect him to?

I took a closer look at him. He didn’t look serious; he didn’t look lost in his thoughts. I am hell sure he wasn’t really looking outside either. His eyes had a look of a stoic. They looked hard, almost as if they had frozen solid. His lips firmly closed, he never looked inside the bus (not once even at our desirable girl!!!). His legs moved once in a while but his eyes were fixed outside. He had the look of an impeccable patriarch, of Al Pacino in Scarface. Experience can only teach you the kind of insecurities that are usually hidden behind those stony faces and confident looks.

Despite his apparently I-don’t-care look, I could see that he just has had an internal debate whether or not to give the girl his seat. Between the two debating parties, let’s say, the social-guy and the girls-are-equal-guy; obviously the latter won. But the former refused to leave the stage completely, and this tussle brought in the open a third guy—I-don’t-care-guy.

Only one question remained—who was he fooling?