Thursday, March 28, 2019

The absence of gratitude

What I find missing in this whole mass immigration phenomenon of recent years, which was there till one or two decades ago, is gratitude

Both the possession of it in the incoming peoples, and the expectation to see it in the incoming peoples from the hosts' side. 

If a person had genuinely fled horrible circumstances, he/she would be grateful to their host country and thus would go the extra mile to comply, fit in, not make overt shows of own culture or religion, not throw rocks at ambulances, learn to communicate effectively (you don't need to learn the whole language; hand signs and basic words are enough, dude and now you have smartphones), to earn their keep, etc etc. I'm not talking about rubbing your nose in the ground : that's submission. What I'm referring to is gratitude and extra decency that comes from that sense of gratitude. Any people can still keep their pride and their identity intact whilst simultaneously displaying gratitude and decency to their hosts.

There's no way a grateful person would do ANY of the things that we see coming out of the present generation of immigrants to the West (by the way, anybody out there that STILL believes they're all Syrian refugees only as was heavily marketed to us?). I have grown up in an Indian expat family in Saudi Arabia while my Dad was working there. We had our differences with the locals especially in personal values, but we always had this feeling that we've gotten a decent shot at something way better, so let's make the most of it and let's tread carefully in front of our hosts; let's not do anything that may offend our hosts in any way, because at the end of the day, this is their home. 

We never expected the host population to "not offend" us - that wasn't even in the picture. If we received hospitality (and, newsflash : You receive hospitality precisely when you're not demanding it.), and we really did and I will always fondly remember the great Saudi hospitality despite all my disagreements with the Saudi Arabian culture, their foreign policies etc, we were grateful for it. It's not something to expect; it's a bonus.

And we weren't even refugees - we were just there for the better opportunities (not free stuff : better opportunities. There's a difference, mate!). 

You know what it indicates when you don't see gratitude in the immigrants - whether you call them "refugees" or "economic migrants"? It indicates that there are other reasons besides pressing circumstances or better economic opportunities. It indicates the presence of Entitlement instead of Gratitude. 

<-- Bit more serious digression -->
There was a collective aspect to this too. We clearly had a group identity as an expat population, and with that came group responsibility. If there was a case of one of ours doing something terrible, then that was a blot of all of us and that automatically put all of us at risk. Therefore we had a collective obligation to ensure someone from our group doesn't screw up. But do I see that in the recent immigrant populations of Europe, Canada now? No. I know that there will always be "one-off" incidents, but when thousands upon thousands of cases pile up in a very short amount of time, and when you go into the actual details of these cases and see the statements made by the people around the place, you start to see the common patterns : First and foremost there is an absolute absence of gratitude, not just in the criminal but in the whole surroundings. A thousand men have to think of European women as fair game for one of them to go ahead and commit a gruesome rape. It's never a solitary spike : it's always a bell curve. 

5 years ago I would not have believed these kinds of things could happen in Europe. That was where you went to get away from this madness. So many blood-curdling gruesome rapes, rape+murders, gang rapes, gang-rape-games, violent crimes, random on-street violence, organised gangs grooming and raping thousands of girls outside their community (by the way, along with white British girls, Sikh girls have also been a large victim group of the grooming gangs of UK), and the default line is "don't look at me, I didn't do it!" and the corresponding "how dare you blame the whole group, you're such a racist" from the noble valiant Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) who have no idea that their over-protectiveness towards their designated protected class has only empowered the criminals amongst that class instead of actually helping anybody. Perpetual victim mode is the perfect crucible for breeding irresponsible and outright pathological behaviours : because as long as you think of yourself as a victim, you can do anything you want without any accountability whatsoever.

Where's the sense of responsibility? Had there been even an iota of Gratitude, we would have seen a radically different set of responses and actions. We would have seen, by now, with the spate of horrible crimes, neighbourhood squads formed amongst immigrants to catch their miscreants and strictly discipline them (because they're taking the whole group down with them!) or hand them over to the local police. Instead, what we see is the migrant groups creating no-go zones where police, and even firefighters and ambulances are attacked, where they shelter their miscreants (and by miscreants I mean rapists and murderers and even terrorists) from legal accountability and where they openly declare that this area is not Sweden or Germany or <host country> anymore and their own traditional customs and laws apply here. If there was even an iota of Gratitude present, none of this would ever have happened; nothing like this could even begin to happen. The fact that this has indeed happened, indicates not just absence of gratitude at individual level, but more troublingly, absence of gratitude and presence of entitlement in its place at a population-wide level.

Apologies; I didn't want to bring in more strong language here, but there are serious things happening in our world that our mainstream media as well as our intellectual class living on nirvana steroids is hyper-actively making sure you never find out about. There's a reason they are on such a desperate overdrive to censor everyone who doesn't agree with their narrative : they are mortally afraid of what will happen when the population finds out about what they've been covering up.

<-- End of bit more serious digression -->


In hindi we have a phrase "Sir pe bithaa ke rakhaa hai" that literally translates to "putting the other on top of your head". And the moral of that phrase is that if you do too much hospitality and the opposite person doesn't have gratitude in them, then you're going to get abused. I am seeing that phrase coming to life at a continental level today.

We're seeing a toxic mix of entitlement on one end and white guilt on another causing abnormally high hospitality, which fuels more entitlement in turn. 
It would be great if we could return back to gratitude, people : immigrants must show it, and hosts must expect it. Hospitality needs to be conditional on gratitude. I won't comment about other sectors here, but in this case for sure, unconditional loving is only breeding entitledness and abuse. And even the entitled folks aren't happy by the way so the SJWs' goal for making sure everyone is happy is pre-screwed by design : the perpetual victim mode guarantees absence of happiness from one's life.

And more importantly the comments below it.

Disclaimer : My family has long back moved back to India; got no dog in this mass immigration fight at present and I can sit from afar and observe. If we were still staying there I wouldn't be comfortable saying any of this, so please recognise that there can be more people feeling this stuff but not able to express it.

Addendum:

Related video, and one that brought me hope:
Egyptian President Al-Sisi: People in Our Countries Should Not Expect the West to Welcome Them

Some more Indian proverbs on Gratitude and exploitation of hospitality:

"Tu maan na maan, main tera mehmaan" >> Irrespective of what you feel, I'm your guest and you have to serve me

"Ungli dikhayee toh haath nigal gaye" >> (Literal) gave a finger and (they) swallowed the arm

"Deraa maand ke baith gaye" >> effective and applicable translation: Got in without consent, dug in and have no intentions of leaving.

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