What I See
I see an older married couple (matching colors, closeness, ring on woman's finger) sharing a newspaper that I think is in Hindi.
What I Feel
I feel that there is peace there, in the midst of a country's storm … so I am going to do my fiction about someone who discovers that peace, but needs a place to talk about it honestly, and so ALSO discovers Hive and those here willing to hear a different kind of story from the Global South. I WAS a professional journalist as a copy editor, so I know how " mainstream news" ignores the kind of story I am going to describe, and why.
Sometimes as an international journalist, there are stories you find that you are not sent to cover, that no one really wants to read … but those are the ones we really need.
Covid-19 plays differently in other parts of the world than it does back home … back home, people have an abundance of masks, options to get necessities, all kinds of government assistance to help more classes of people get these, and abundance of vaccines.
Nonetheless, Covid-19 is ripping the country up because people want their own way, and do not care about the consequences.
India is a totally different situation – more than a billion people there, and the country still is working its way through the damages of 300 years of colonialism. Urban centers are very crowded, and infrastructure to get around contagious situations is less prevalent. There is a rigid caste system that allows the bottom castes access to very little – not that I as an American citizen can look down on India for that, familiar as I am with the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and how the criminal justice system still targets people to put them in a permanent underclass. If my nation can claim progress, it must claim regress as well – but I digress.
In India, Covid-19 cannot be easily avoided, and the nation has suffered much in this 18 months.
My whole job is to get the photographs that support the story of the suffering.
Sometimes I feel like people back home buy more newspapers when they can look at darker-skinned people suffering more – it makes them feel a bit more superior, even though Covid-19 doesn't give two dead flies about anything but making itself at home in humans, at all costs to the humans.
Certainly pictures like the above don't get picked to run, which is why, as a freelancer, I can bring my stuff to Hive.
I always love seeing people reading newspapers, everywhere – heck, the paper pays me what I have to use to live until Hive goes on and reaches $5-10. Sooner or later, but, again, I digress.
It is a fact that it is mostly the older people reading newspapers, around the world, so this couple is really no surprise.
What struck me, though, was the perfect peace … clearly a married couple, wearing similar colors, a wedding band visible on the wife's left hand, sitting close, both in their wheelchairs, just reading.
Back home people talk about how people like them shouldn't even be out if they are afraid of Covid-19 … but I think they are past the age of being worried. These are spirited old folks here – the wife's hair is a radiant, defiant red, and in India, if the husband didn't approve, that wouldn't likely be allowed.
In the midst of their country's great suffering, they have created for themselves a place of fresh air, love, closeness, and peace … reading of other things than death and tragedy, creating for themselves a place and space of refuge.
Of course the paper didn't run it. That's not the narrative that plays in the West about India – or anywhere that is moving on from being colonized. The old lie was that the best thing going for seven whole tenths of the world's people was to be colonized and/or enslaved to Europe. Many folks of that background hate being proved wrong – and proving people wrong doesn't sell newspapers. It is what it is.
Which is why I posted this here, and powered up some Hive today.
Sooner or later, I'm going to make my living where the whole truth can be told about the peoples of the world, censorship-resistant and free.