Hell: Closer Than You Think

 From the hot wire on the AP, Reports: Abducted girls married to Nigerian rebels:

Scores of girls and young women kidnapped from a school in Nigeria are being forced to marry their Islamic extremist abductors, a civic organization reported Wednesday.
***snip***
"A medieval kind of slavery. You go and capture women and then sell them off," community elder Pogu Bitrus of Chibok, the town where the girls were abducted, told the BBC Hausa Service.

Christ, this is amazingly, brutally horrific. The mind boggles and reels.

The news of negotiations comes as parents say the girls are being sold into marriage to Boko Haram militants. The students are being paid 2,000 naira ($12) to marry the fighters, Halite Aliyu of the Borno-Yobe People's Forum told The Associated Press.

Well, they’re being paid so everything’s AOK...right? What the fuck!?! Do the militants honestly think that $12 absolves them of their little breach of humanity?

Are the young women able to negotiate for, ya know, a better offer? Can they say “No, your price is too low and, in fact, will always be too low. You may take me home now.”

Em, doubt it.

About 50 of the kidnapped girls managed to escape from their captors in the first days after their abduction, but some 220 remain missing, according to the principal of the Chibok Girls Secondary School, Asabe Kwambura. They are between 16 and 18 years old and had been recalled to the school to write a physics exam.

 If I’m understanding this correctly, the young women are just home after an horrific experience — kidnapping, possibly rape and threat of death — and they're popped right back to classes so they can take physics tests.

A) Do they not get ANY downtime where they can process their ordeal?
B) Physics? Damn these girls are big time smart! When I was 16, I was stumbling and bumbling though Biology and Astronomy.
C) OK...maybe getting right back into their normal lives IS the best thing for them. Restore normalcy and shit.

Can you imagine living in a country where an atrocity like this, one on this scale, could happen? (The mass abduction not the physics test, that is)


From the report Who are Nigeria's Boko Haram Islamists? on the BBC:

The threat will disappear only if the Nigerian government manages to reduce the region's chronic poverty and builds an education system which gains the support of local Muslims, the analysts say.

Despite its vast resources, Nigeria ranks among the most unequal countries in the world, according to the UN. The poverty in the north is in stark contrast to the more developed southern states.

Given all the talk, all the news and reports of income inequality here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., how far are we from having our daughters and granddaughters kidnapped by our own home brewed terrorists and fanatics. Yeah, I’m talking about those dangerous, idiot militias, the christianist terror squads with their big box indoctrination centers, the “pro-life” murderers.

From the article Map: U.S. Ranks Near Bottom on Income Inequality in The Atlantic:

The U.S., in purple with a Gini coefficient of 0.450, ranks near the extreme end of the inequality scale. Looking for the other countries marked in purple gives you a quick sense of countries with comparable income inequality, and it's an unflattering list: Cameroon, Madagascar, Rwanda, Uganda, Ecuador.

Are we so very far off from this fate?