India shocks an American grandmother into appreciating her own:
Anne Lamont writes in the LA Times Opinion Section:
I’m doing fairly well for a grandmother who had a monkey tangled up in her hair last month on a ghat in Varanasi at sunset. Back home again now, I can report that in the midst of the zap that is India, with its heartbreaking, gorgeous, hallucinatory, dazzling, kaleidoscopic, mind-blowing grandeur and loud reality — a place where having a monkey’s hand trapped in your dreadlocks is pretty par for the course — I came to three decisions about my own country.
The first is that if the people on the streets of India can keep their humor and good nature, I can keep mine.
I left for the subcontinent the day before the Massachusetts election, and so arrived in a state of rage, despairing that we would ever see healthcare reform. I nearly bit the head off the kindly driver of a tiny rattletrap car — which had broken down by the side of the road to Agra — when he inquired innocently, from under the hood, if I knew anything about wiring.
But after a few days on the subcontinent, I came to the unshakable belief that we will have decent enough healthcare reform, and soon. What’s going to help America rebound from Bush/Cheney is what saved and saves India — love, nonviolence, a lot of help, radical playfulness and perspective. I saw Indians living in spaces the size of my bathtub, giddily colorful amid the squalor and deprivation, making themselves beautiful and focusing on what they do have.
And I remembered that here we have a 59-vote majority, all but a handful of the senators perfectly good Democrats, who’ve passed an adequate healthcare bill, yet we’re mewling and puking and acting like victims. Of course we are coming through the most toxic political cleanup since the Civil War: What happened during the George W. Bush years was in its way as devastating as the earthquake in Haiti, or daily life for much of India — just as many dead, and a constitution nearly destroyed. Suffering is suffering.
So we have to do what is working slowly in the wreckage of Haiti and India: We don’t give up; we take care of each other; we act like grown-ups; we work with what we have; we get our game back.
It’s just like what happened on that trip to Agra. Once I quit sputtering, I gave my driver the blue cord handle of a paper shopping bag I was carrying, and he gamely used it to get the car running again.
