POLARIZATION
I’ve had a very strange feeling during our week here at the Sarvodaya Ashram in Virampur. I have been here a number of times since it’s founding in about 2000 and many more times at Hasmukh’s previous ashram in Amirgadh just a short distance down the road. My odd feeling comes from being in two places at once. The slow pace of rural village life amid the sudden purple mountains with green irrigated fields of wheat or castor plants set among the thorn trees and cactuses of very dry northern Gujurat where the tribal people of Gujurat live contrasts so much with with the forested mountains of Western North Carolina which have their own pace of rural life.
How can two so different places exist at the same time and I flit from one to the other? Each of them seems completely real, but at the same time they are so dissimilar that neither one of them seems real at all. They are almost two imaginary places and I happen to have lived most of my life in one of them.
And then I remember that in Western North Carolina there is a microcosm of the polarizing divisions that divide all of the United States. Liberal urban Asheville is open to all genders, all nationalities, with restaurants serving food of every kind, with a feeling of innovation and entrepreneurship enlivening the city. And just outside the city in the mountain valleys of Madison County there is resentment of Asheville’s city values and a feeling that traditional mountain values, traditional American values, are being threatened by globalism, gender equality, a loss of white supremacy, by fundamental Christian values being undermined. My little college on the edge of Asheville is a threat as well with academic openness undermining mountain values and with a perceived disdain and mockery of ordinary mountain folks.
And yet from the perspective of Virampur, India, both the mountain folks and the city folks of Western North Carolina are so much alike that they seem homogenous. From a Virampur perspective we Americans all speak the same language with the slight difference between the mountain accent or the college influenced accent being undetectable. We mostly, Methodist or Missionary Baptist, sing the same hymns, and worship the same god and his son Jesus Christ. Jews and and Catholics and Protestants all look exactly alike with nothing in anything that we do to distinguish us. We all watch the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl. We watch the same tv shows. We drive the same cars and eat in the same restaurants. We share the same history and have the same basic values of a love of freedom, a desire to be independent, a feeling of pride in our country.
So how is it that with our undetectable differences we have such polarized attitudes toward each other that we cannot even speak about politics without getting in an argument and are upset with even the mention of the code words by which we identify each other as if we all have bumper stickers on our chests announcing who we are?
From a Virampur perspective we have everything in common with no way to distinguish one from the other. But from a Swannanoa perspective the differences seem huge with only the slightest hint of an accent or a choice of vocabulary giving us away completely.
How can this be? Why is it that having everything in common we can’t realize how tiny our differences are and how much we are all family bound to each other by shared values that are much more important than our small differences. How could we see ourselves as others see us, all alive, one family.
And why is it that the values of Virampur: completely different gods, different language, different attitudes toward freedom and independence, different history where people are different from Western Carolinians in almost every way, that we from Western Carolina don’t feel a threat to our values and we, and they, can be open and friendly?
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 