PADA: A concerned devotee wrote to PADA that in his devotee community most of the devotees have had "service jobs" such as: store clerks, Uber drivers, security guards, restaurant help, hotel maid cleaning, delivery drivers, data input, secretaries, and similar. And their jobs have been going away, with a number now "on furlough."
A few devotees have had more professional jobs, like teachers, but they are also having a shaky time of it with various start and stop programs going on. Even people working as Amazon delivery drivers or warehouse persons feel that job is not entirely safe, because some of these workers are getting sick.
So that means, more and more of these devotees are more and more dependent on government assistance. And the government meanwhile can't seem to come up with more than a few ad hoc temporary measures, which is not a long range solution.
And it also appears that the USA "plan" -- or simply lack thereof -- has been to slow pedal the virus testing, making people wait in long lines, if they can find a place that tests at all. And then they have to wait sometimes 14 days for the results, which is pretty useless at that stage.
So the "plan" to contain the virus as other countries have done, has still not really happened in all this time at least in the USA. Then again, waiting until there are 50,000 + new cases a day makes contact tracing "nearly impossible." So there is no real means to test the contacts of the people who end up positive, which means the viral spread is more and more out of control.
In sum, the government assistance process is not something that looks reliable long term. A lot of these devotees already had a shaky situation of "just about making it" before the virus problem started. So it does seem like more and more devotees are heading for problems, and this particular devotee thinks a number of devotees could end up as jobless and homeless. He hopes that won't happen, but has a rather pessimistic view.
And that means some devotees could also potentially be struggling for food and other supplies. I am not an alarmist in general, but this devotee may have a point. Of course, with the overall devotee situation being somewhat more dysfunctional that the mundane society, it does not look like there is a lot we can do here. If anyone has any suggestions we'd love to see what they are.
So this is one reason I am not so happy with the way the virus pandemic, or whatever it is, is being handled. Slow pedalling is making the economy worse, especially for the lower rungs, which includes many / most devotees. One economist said the USA economy is heading over the cliff in a cataclysmic way, and its possible since Srila Prabhupada often said there would be a big unemployment problem.
Is now the time for that to happen?
Maybe, or at least its being introduced gradually. So although I don't have much sympathy for the overall mundane society getting bigger and better at the expense of the environment, I do have sympathy for the many devotees who will be in a very vulnerable situation should the mundane society start to dysfunction if not melt down in different ways.
Of course the hope of the USA leaders is that some vaccine or wonder drug will fix the virus problem. UCSF is working on a nasal spray wonder drug, but even they say its only a stop gap until a better fix is found. So a medical fix might happen, maybe so, and maybe not. Of course, even if they fix this problem, the next big mess is coming down the road anyway in the shape of climate change, devalued currency or so many other potential hazards.
Thus! All of this should be a wake up call -- that the devotees have been WAY too complacent in getting together Srila Prabhupada's self sufficient rural communities -- where devotees can live "off the grid" and not be dependent on small time service jobs and / or government hand outs etc.
In sum, Krishna warned us via Srila Prabhupada that the flood of problems was coming down the pipeline, and so we better build a varnasrama farms and rural programs ark as a shelter from the storm. We didn't. And now, its raining problems and we failed to make the shelter safety ark he told us to make. Anyway, we think now is more than even an important time for the devotees to start to re-think getting these rural shelters together. Time is not on our side. ys pd
GKD: RE: Will More Krishna Devotees Become Homeless?
ReplyDeleteThis is now proven ... that when it comes to making living GBC gurus that keeps ISKCON's congregation on the sudra platform. They have no problem when devotees work at Karmi companies. Grown-up Gurukulis always lament, we have no college degree, no science education, no academic diploma. This means they are kept on the platform of dog. At least this is what Prabhupada is saying about modern education. First of all they did not follow Prabhupada and have functioning farm communities and second, they tell their grhasthas to have children as many as possible who get a sudra education. Nothing of that sort of entrepreneur-education and financial-education to at least work as vaisya or make a living in the West as Brahmana. Devotee families flee to India, grown-up gurukulis are still in a suicidal condition of not being able to maintain a family in the West. So this is all a chaotic situation as George Harrison used to say.
[PADA: Correct. Srila Prabhupada says the demons thrive and prosper on chaos. And the GBC is simply one emergency meeting after another to try to patch up the scandals of their fallen down gurus, just to keep their living gurus program going and not to care for the society.
And they did not even give their own gurukulis a regular education, many of them struggled to learn how to spell and do basic maths. So that means they took the money to care for the kulis and used it for themselves. One of these kulis got some money from the Windle Turley lawsuit and he bought an old pick up truck and a lawn mower and started a little lawn services business, and he told me without that money to buy the truck -- he would have had nothing and would have been a homeless beggar person with no support from anywhere. So that means many of the parents, most of the leaders, in sum every level of support was taken away for a lot of these kids, never mind support for the farms was similarly dwindled off and diverted to jet set lives for the elite. Anyway now a few of them like Bhakti Raghava and Bhakti Vikas swamis are talking varnasrama, but its really too little too late. They should have spoken up in 1978. Anyway we are where we are now. So individually and collectively, the Krishna society failed to follow the prime directive of the leader, to make varnasrama farms. And all of us collectively will have to now suffer from that negligence and disobeying. So we fiddled as Rome burned so to speak, and that is unfortunate. At the same time, the need for these rural farms is more important than ever so hopefully it will inspire some folks some where to take action. ys pd