If They Only Knew

Americans have so much to be grateful for, yet often forget. Modern Democrats, Marxist by slant, seem to think they need more, and those working, earning, creating, and producing, owe them. We do not. If they only knew … If they only knew.

Many years ago, I undertook a project in rural India – a foray to that nation’s rural interior. I hoped to understand conditions lived, rights lost, and how US laws might help win back those rights.

Bottom-line-up-front, those months living with the “Untouchables” in uncharted central India taught me more than I bargained for, got me sick, but educated me on rights.

Books will tell you India has four castes: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Sudras – the top tier, warriors, merchants, and laborers. Below these castes are the “outcastes,” or “Untouchables,” what Mahatma Gandhi called the “Harijans,” or “Children of God.”

My mission was to understand what these “least of the least” did for a living, how they survived, how they were treated by the recognized castes, and what rights they were denied from birth.

The nutshell is that they are treated miserably, isolated and impoverished, put away like lepers, and treated as slaves – what Indians politely call “bonded labor,” repaying ancestral debts forever.

The data was enough to shock a young American, who thought rights came from God and laws were to preserve “liberties” and “equal protection” for all Indians. “Castes” were alien and repugnant.

The cascading effect of being an “Untouchable” was obvious. These families were sick with typhoid, jaundice, anemia, dysentery, and countless other diseases. They lived in abject poverty, subsisting on minimal food, modestly farming – by hand – and had no rights.

Somehow, odd as it sounds, India’s 90,000-word 1948 Constitution did little for the  “poorest of the poor.”  By all appearances, they did not count.

Living among the “Untouchables” in small villages and travelling with a “hospital boat,” I began to understand real poverty. Elders were in their 40s, looked in their 90’s, died young, no medicine.

Children were born, diseases suffered, injuries endured without medication, and no physicians. Women were anemic, no red veins – even in their eyes. The hospital boat administered iron shots.

Sweltering Indian heat – over 100 degrees for weeks – was matched by humidity, and somehow suffered quietly in circular, hand-built jute huts, simple shade, no air conditioning, and no overhead fans.

The rural “Untouchables” of central India, Andhra Pradesh, and Orissa, were so removed that they had never seen a fan, no electricity or batteries, no energy except experimental from fledgling non-government-organizations. They did not know New Delhi or Bombay existed. None had heard of America.

My reason for coming was to record what these forgotten citizens suffered, then work with Indira Gandhi’s former attorney general to shape cases before India’s Supreme Court. This we did, applying US laws to help justify closer attention to these extreme inequalities.

On my return home in 1985, my sensibilities were jarred. While publishing a law article on inequalities suffered by India’s “Untouchables”–  how they might be remedied with US law – the experience never left me.

Having lived with forgotten souls, eating rice and chilies daily, fingering food from banana leaves, watching underfed children live without complaint, sitting cross-legged and sharing stories from “my native land” – Maine, USA – in exchange for their stories, something inside you changes.

These impoverished, forgotten Indians never saw snow or a two-story building, never slept in a bed – closest to a latticework of rope two-feet high to protect children from cobras. They knew nothing of the world, no conceptual understanding of light at night, electronics, trains, or airplanes.

They were not graced by medicine, as their remoteness, poverty, and outcaste status kept it from them. They were, oddly enough, somehow peaceful, although most died young. They did not know they were dying young, what they were missing.

Returning to the United States, I climbed off a plane at JFK to reengage with the whirling, whizzing, noisy, fast-paced everything we call normal. A well-dressed man in his 20s blocked my way exiting the airport, a boombox and headphones, bobbing to some song, plastic cup out, begging money.

All these years later, I have not forgotten that. These days, when I see well-dressed Marxists parading around, protesting this and that about America with placards and signs, bullhorns, whistles, and belligerence, I sometimes ponder. They have no idea what they have.

They have no idea what America is or offers, and never stop to think how blessed they are. They forget, in their ideological fits and fury, what is possible here but not elsewhere, what liberties, equality, opportunity, chances to work, and upward mobility they have  – and how few have these blessings.

Rather than gratitude, pausing to count blessings, saying prayers, and thanking our forefathers, recognizing America is a miracle, and they are the most blessed souls on earth, they rant and rave. If they only knew… If they only knew.  

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, Maine attorney, ten-year naval intelligence officer (USNR), and 25-year businessman. He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (North Country Press, 2018), and “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024). He is the National Spokesman for AMAC. Today, he is running to be Maine’s next Governor (please visit BobbyforMaine.com to learn more)!