Marriage Stumble

I was kinda surprised today....Germany admitted that it was forging ahead and criminalizing forced marriage.  In Alabama (where I grew up)....forced marriage kind of meant that some local boy was real stupid....got some girl pregnant, and her dad shows up with a baseball bat to indicate you would marry her (to make the situation right).  Everyone went along with this....even though everyone knew they'd be divorced within five years.  Yeah, we can admit it was stupid.

In this case, there is a fairly different scenario to view.  Forced marriages in Germany fit strictly into Muslim family situations.  You have some 16-year old girl who starts to look like a "problem".  The problem typically means that she's very liberal....anti-family....not cooperating with traditions of a typical Muslim family....and she needs intervention.

This intervention means that some cousins go out and find an older true-to-Islam guy and he's brought in to meet Dad to work out the arrangement.  Days later, Dad has a meeting with the daughter and lets her know that he's pick her husband, and it might be six months away or six days away.

The daughter typically freaks out.  She never expected Dad to be this crazy.  She talks to Mom....which does nothing for her case.  She talks to her cousin, who insists this is for her own good.  And then she has the last option of just trying to escape from the family.

Over the past ten years....there's dozens of episodes where young girls were forced to marry, or ran off to be found by the family later and beaten (in some cases, murdered by the family).

The government says that if convicted of a forced marriage (both Mother and Father) could end up with five years.  I'm guessing if kids are still left in the house....the DA would likely go for a full five year period for Dad, and maybe let Mom off with almost nothing.

This is an interesting mess.  Throughout the 1960s and 1970s....there weren't many of these forced marriage episodes.  In some ways, this mess comes up now because of increased Islamic peer pressure and more Mosques in existence than thirty years ago.  If some local guy thinks Musaff has gotten disrespect from his daughter....he'll make it a group topic and force Musaff into some reactionary phase that normally he would have never done.

In some ways....it's an integration problem.  People have their old perceptions in abundance, and need some fresh peer pressure that isn't of a Muslim variety.

I sat and pondered over this.  It's kinda funny when compared against Germans.  Here we have a vast number of German women.....some into their forties and fifties....still single, and Dad (Huns is now seventy years old) wished he had "forced" Dora to marry that punk idiot Dieter down the street back in 1988.

To be kinda honest, there's this vast problem of Germans 'waiting' for long and extended periods....before ever marrying.  You could have some healthy, highly educated, fit, lusty German gal standing there at age thirty-three, and really wishing something would happen.  Maybe some Prince Charming character from a foreign land (maybe Boaz, Alabama) or Italy walks up and she decides she'll overlook twenty of his serious faults and just accept the fool.

So, this is an interesting slice of German life to compare against a non-integrated German life.  One needs some help, and the other has to be threaten with five years in prison if they do anything stupid involving marriage.

Integration Spin

I stopped and pondered this news item from Germany today.  The German integration commissioner....yes, they do have one....Maria Böhmer....stood up and said that the German government ought to have a Integration Ministry.

This is an odd situation to view.  Typically....when people arrive on your shores, they have this dream of getting into your system....being part of your success....getting a boost up via your economic system.....and melding into your society.

You go to America in the 1800s, and people wanted to be part of the "dream".  You go and look at immigrants in Canada over the past hundred years, and it's the same.  You go and look at Australia over the past hundred years....and it's the same.  Yet, we have Germany with this odd problem where people came for something but no one is sure about why they came...and integration wasn't in their top three priorities.  You'd like to ask what is in the top three....but you'd just intimidate them and make them feel uncomfortable.

So, the answer here?  You spend tens of millions of Euro, to create an entire ministry?  You start with 500 staff members who walk around and talk integration daily?  You buy twenty Audi A8 staff cars to get these integration chiefs from meeting to meeting?  You pay some graphic arts company 40k Euro to create a integration symbol so you can walk proudly onto any TV show?   And then you spread out to have integration offices in every state, then every county, and then every city?

Sitting at some Gasthaus tonight in the heartland of Germany are Huns and Franz.  The boys sit there and chat over the events of the day.  They've had two beers and are nursing through the positive economic trend, the latest antics of national soccer teams, and then they come to this topic of integration.

Huns scratches his head and wonders how exactly a national office will change things.  Franz will respond that  the Hartz IV office does help welfare recipients.  Huns will counter that a jobs office would be enough to help most of the welfare recipients.  They will argue back and forth for an hour.

Finally, Musaff the local Turk walks in and orders a beer.  Huns and Franz asks Musaff what he thinks of this integration office idea.  Musaff thinks for a minute and offers a simple analysis: the worst punishment for any German is to spend ninety minutes on a Sunday evening political chat show listening to some German ministry guy sparkle and shine over some fancy policy change.  Musaff smiles, and then says....if you don't integrate, then you'd don't learn the language, and then you won't understand a word from the idiot from the integration ministry.  You can sleep well at night by claiming non-integration and the only one all bent out of shape from Sunday night political chat antics, will be the German idiots listening.....who don't worry about integration anyway.

Huns and Franz finally realize the brilliance of this.  The next day, they both enroll in a Turkish language class and work hard to non-integrate themselves.  After five years, their blood pressure is lower, their lives are simpler, and they both are happy as non-integrated Germans....in the German heartland.