subliminal

I awoke from my asleep-but-not-asleep stupor just a few moments ago. It was so confusing...I was not sure if I was asleep or awake...I just felt like I was suspended right smack in the middle. Eyes wide open and mind shut tight. But for some inane reason, one recurring thought was being mulled over in my mind...

My subconscious thinking was probably evoked by my reading of the book The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I was reading this book before I fell into my asleep-but-not-asleep stupor.

Over and over, my mind was chewing on the thought of the Hindu caste system... the touchables and untouchables... and how discriminating and condescending it can be. To think (as described by the book),

"Paravans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defile themselves by accidentally stepping into a Paravan's footprint... Paravans, like other Untouchables, were not allowed to walk on public roads, not allowed to cover their upper bodies, not allowed to carry umbrellas. They had to put their hands over their mouths when they spoke, to divert their polluted breath away from those whom they addressed."

In other words, they were treated like dirt.

But the caste system is just one of the named and recognized social stratifications on Earth. There are others... Other unspoken ones. Think about the hierarchy between the freshmen and the seniors: the upperclassman vs. the lowerclassman... the tensions between the beauty and the geek, the scholar and the jock... the partition between the rich and the poor, the educated and uneducated... these divisions can even navigate to the most inane things such as the color of your skin. Stereotypical, I know, but they are there. We may deny it, fight against it, and ignore it... but these barriers remain. Rare is it that they are completely and entirely broken down. It's depressing.