I ran across this sad story out of central India today:
Two farmers from Bijapur district have been arrested for allegedly killing a seven-year old girl to offer her body part as a sacrifice to God for good crops, police said on Monday.Two farmers, Padam Sukku and Pignesh Kujur, have been arrested for killing the girl, Lalita, in anticipation of good crops... When quizzed, Sukku and Kujur admitted they had kidnapped and strangled her. They said they had removed the liver and offered it to the God at a temple. They buried her body which was retrieved by animals.
Sad, indeed. Though apparently not a lone incident:
Human sacrifices and killing of poor people, mainly women in the name of witchcraft, in forested tribal hamlets in the state are not new to Chhattisgarh despite government regularly conducting peoples' awareness drives to educate the people about such social evils.
Now, because this story happened thousands of miles away from where most of us live here in the bright and shiny US of A, the horror of it is a bit removed. And that, in turn, makes it easier for us to sit here in our Barcaloungers feeling all smug about ourselves. After all, we 'murkins are civilized and knowledgeable, right? We're not mired in poverty and illiteracy. We know that making sacrifices to some deity won't make the harvest any better. We're educated! We're sophisticated! We respond to a poor growing season—too little rain, too much heat—with science and logic, not backwards and silly superstition. Why, the very idea of doing so is simply preposterous in a modern, forward-thinking nation such as ours!
The thing is, though, if you really feel that way, you might not wanna start patting yourself on the back just yet.
