(Indian men supporting female demonstrators in Delhi).

Have you wondered what was in that Kool-Aid we all drank? It is hard to make sense of it. I feel it in the air. A Pope quits, first time in 700 years. The first runner with no legs goes from the Olympics to prison for murder. In the background is all that noise about this and that.

Maybe it is a function of the pent-up energy from staying inside and the fierce desire for the warmth of Spring. Still, this collision of belief systems is starting to concern me. I would compare it to the dysfunctional sitcom family relations in “Shameless,” but that would be a slight to the fine ensemble cast around William H. Macy.

The issues- budget, debt, taxes- are intensely personal yet in a system as complex as ours, astonishingly amorphous. They require believe systems in which to navigate the institutions. All the Big Issues require a sort of baseline belief and as broader means of communications become available an inverse narrowing of discourse is permitted.

I mentioned the other day that we all now have the capabilities to establish our own networks. That enables us to tune out things that are not in accordance with our belief systems. Mine runs toward the libertarian end of the spectrum, within reason. It is always interesting to run into the other belief systems, and increasingly these collisions seem to have the characteristics of a religious conflict.

The intellectual segregation enabled by the Net is interesting, isn’t it?

I had better get back to ignoring it, considering that there is little an individual can do against vast historical trends. But that is what Kissinger thought about the USSR, so maybe we all just keep moving.

I heard one of those explosive echoes of our recent past on the BBC this morning. Valentines Day in India had a very different tone than it did here. Shiv Sena activists protested against the celebration of the day, hundreds of women on the street. Loud.

They have a lot to be loud about. I have always been a feminist, sometimes tepid, maybe, but I never could deny the intelligence, energy and wit of my mother. By extrapolation, the idea that women were not equals didn’t make any sense.

We had our social moments in the emergence of women’s liberation as I recall, and some high elbows thrown. But there was good reason for it, and violence against women is still very much an issue, though some important context has changed.

The social conflict goes on, of course, with the integration of women into the combat arms. I do not know if it will make sense- logic carried to its ultimate being often not where you started to go, but we will learn our lessons and go on.

The rhetoric from Delhi made me feel a little grateful for our past. Passion against the Patriarchy was refreshing and gave me a little context to how far this society has come in a remarkably short time. The troubles elsewhere are just getting started. Violence against women in India is systemic and brutal. Women are fighting back.

I support Pussy Riot’s struggle with Mr. Putin’s muscular impersonation of Peter the Great.

But what I confronted with contempt in 1991 is still alive and well far beyond Russia. It opposes and exploits hundreds of millions. I had to immerse myself in the cultures of the places where we were fighting. What I saw made me grateful to be an American. Name an issue- violence, rape, mutilation, humiliation, they have it in spades.

There is an arc of oppression- brutal oppression- directed at woman from India west across the Islamic world. Save our Sisters.

Women’s liberation now.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com