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.
In 2011, Texas endured both the hottest summer of any state ever and the worst one-year drought in its recorded history (which, weather-wise, goes back to 1895). Many areas of the state received only fractions of their normal rainfall for the year. Lakes, reservoirs, and rivers in Texas evaporated away under months of relentless and blistering sun. Farmers watched helplessly as hundreds of thousands of acres of their crops withered and died, and ranchers found themselves dumping their starving livestock on the market at a loss, or, in some instances, simply culling their cattle and sheep1.
And, of course, the state burned. Boy, did it ever: as of December 16th, more than 3,980,000 acres of the state had gone up in flames. That's 6,200 square miles, or an area larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. (A fun exercise: picture a map of the northeastern United States. Next, draw a box in your mind with its left corners on Stamford and Canaan in Connecticut, and its right corners on Newport and Woonsocket in Rhode Island. Now picture every inch of land inside that box reduced to smoldering cinders—cities, towns, farmland, woodland, malls, schools, homes, etc. Got it, yes? Big, yes? Well, that massive imaginary bonfire in your head is still considerably smaller than what burned in Texas last year.)
So what was the oh-so-logical response of the enlightened governor of Texas to this catastrophe? What was his "Let's roll up our sleeves and figure out how to beat this thing!" answer? How did this southern-drawling, cougar-shooting, corndog-munching pretender to the highest office in the land rise to such a tremendous challenge?
Why, he did what any modern-day leader would do: he offered to his deity a still warm liver ripped from a seven-year-old girl. Wait. Strike that out. I mean, he officially proclaimed several days of prayer for Texas.
Yes, long ago—way back in 2011, when modern-day Texans already had iPads, flat-screen TVs, supercomputers, broadband internet access, the Johnson Space Center, and some of the best institutions of higher learning in the country—the best Governor Aw-Shucks could do was proclaim a period creatively named "Days of Prayer for Rain", a three-day April extravaganza during which Texans of all faiths were to fall on bended knee and beseech the gods (or, you know, The God) to bring some drought relief to the state. At the time, about 10% of Texas was suffering from "severe drought", and apparently Perry's proclamation fell on deaf ears (or maybe his deity hates Texas, perhaps for executing mentally challenged people), for by September that had grown to 88%. Now, even if you don't for one reason or another2 side with climate scientists on the issue of anthropogenic climate change, you have to admit it was hot and dry in Texas this year. That is, even if you don't believe anything meteorologists and climate scientists say because you think they're all evil and manipulative idiots in on a great worldwide socialist scam aimed at taking away your God-given Constitutional right to use 500-watt incandescent bulbs to light your refrigerator, the state's billions of dollars in withered cow carcasses, fields full of limp and wasted crops, and charred remains of thousands of homes should be enough to convince you how just bad it was. And, thus convinced, only the most dim Texan (read: Rick Perry) would suggest a simplistic course of action not so very different from kidnapping a young girl, removing her liver, and offering it to The Big Rain God In The Sky.
Please note that I'm not claiming that Rick Perry has actually engaged in kidnapping young girls and cutting out their livers as a way of appeasing his deity and begging for an end to the state's ongoing drought. So far as I know, he's never done such a thing. Doing so probably doesn't cross his mind all that often, filled as it is with other weighty thoughts. Besides, if he had, I've no doubt that retelling the story of how he did it would be a smash hit among the barbecue-and-beans crowd, and we would thus have seen it celebrated on Fox. So to reiterate: there's no proof whatsoever that Rick Perry has sacrificed any children to gain favor with some deity. And if there is, it's well-hidden. Okay?
What I am claiming, however, is this: when the governor of a huge state—especially one with an economy heavily dependent on growing things—responds to an all-out agricultural crisis by blaming that crisis on the whims of his chosen deity, and suggesting that the very best course of action is to beseech his constituents to beg that deity for rain, he is acting different from the child-sacrificing, liver-offering Indian men in the story above only by a matter of degree.
(Don't get me wrong: prayer is a good thing, and it can be quite powerful. But prayer alone isn't anywhere near enough. If you awaken one morning to find your bedroom aflame, while you're certainly free to pray all you wish, you might also want to make your way out a door or window.)
The bottom line: if you live in Texas3, and if—as expected—the drought extends and worsens well into 2012, I'm sure your Golly-Gee Governor will continue to deny that the climate is changing, just as he'll continue to deny that his state's love affair with fossil fuels is partially to blame for that change. But I still don't think Governor Perry will resort to kidnapping your children for ritual sacrifice.
However, you may want to keep a really close eye on them anyway.
1 - Quickly and humanely killing them before Mother Nature does it in her own particularly slow and cruel way.
2 - You haven't yet learned to read; your cable provider carries only Fox; you've had a lobotomy; you're the CEO of ExxonMobil; etc.
3 - Speaking of that whole "mired in poverty and illiteracy" thing: Texas is ranked #46 out of the 50 states for the percentage of people below the poverty line, right between Alabama and Arkansas. Though it does a little better in illiteracy, coming in at a below average but not-as-bad-as-it-could-be #31.