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Last Days:
Even
families will have greater conflict and break apart as
people become more self-centered and rebellious.
From:
"jagbir singh" <www.adishakti.org@gmail.com>
Date: Sat Jan 1, 2005 8:10 am
Subject: Re: Shri Mataji: "It means the Last
Judgment has begun with full force."
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—- In
shriadishakti@yahoogroups.com,
"jagbir singh"
<adishakti_org@y...> wrote:
>
> In various places throughout the Bible we are told
that these
> "last days" will not be good times for mankind....
Even families
> will have greater conflict and break apart as people
become more
> self-centered and rebellious.
>
Percentage of Divorces in Selected Countries (Europe/N.
America)
Country / Divorces (as % of marriages) 1996
Belarus 68%
Russian Federation 65%
Sweden 64%
Latvia 63%
Ukraine 63%
Czech Republic 61%
Belgium 56%
Finland 56%
Lithuania 55%
United Kingdom 53%
Moldova 52%
United States 49%
Hungary 46%
Canada 45%
Norway 43%
France 43%
Germany 41%
Netherlands 41%
Switzerland 40%
Iceland 39%
Kazakhstan 39%
Luxembourg 39%
Austria 38%
Denmark 35%
Slovakia 34%
Bulgaria 28%
Israel 26%
Slovenia 26%
Kyrgyzstan 25%
Romania 24%
Portugal 21%
Poland 19%
Armenia 18%
Greece 18%
Turkmenistan 18%
Spain 17%
Azerbaijan 15%
Croatia 15%
Cyprus 13%
Tajikistan 13%
Georgia 12%
Italy 12%
Uzbekistan 12%
Albania 7%
Turkey 6%
Macedonia 5%
Source: Human Development Report, 1999, United Nations.
GETTING OUT
TIMEasia magazine
Posted Monday, March 29, 2004; 21:00 HKT
Divorce was once all but unthinkable in Asia, but now
it's become
almost standard. And these days it's women who are doing
most of the
dumping
Whatever else I thought I would become, I never imagined
I would be
twice divorced before the age of 40. As a 16-year-old,
through
shoplifted volumes of Shelley and Keats, I surpassed the
peer-group
average comfortably when it came to interest in gushing
romance.
Four years later, I eloped with my then girlfriend and
we were
married in a registry office above a music store. My
abiding
memories are of the registrar's ankle boots of bright
orange suede,
the unspeakable luxury of spending $10 on a taxi home,
and of the
feeling, as we pronounced our vows, that the marriage
was utterly,
inviolably, forever. I thought the same of my second
marriage,
too—moreover, I thought it with the added conviction of
maturity
(I was 30) and experience (with the first marriage
written off as
youthful impulse). But here I am: a two-time visitor to
the family
court. The kind of person that, if I ever make it into
the tabloid
press, might be snickeringly described as a
"twice-divorced father
of one." I don't sound good on paper.
But in reviewing my marital history—as one does on a
former
anniversary, or when chancing on an inscription in the
flyleaf of a
yellowing book—I have taken some comfort from the fact
that, all
around me, fellow Asians are divorcing in record
numbers. You might
think that Asia—with its weighty traditional values,
male
chauvinism and hang-ups about face—would be less
susceptible to
the epidemic of divorce that has swept the West these
past 40 years
or so. If there were one place where two people would be
prepared to
endure weary decades of unfulfillment for the sake of
the children
or religion or appearances, you might guess that it
would be here.
But you would be wrong. While it's difficult to
generalize across
the region, stigmas once attached to divorce are clearly
losing
their force across Asia. Says Professor Stella Quah, a
sociologist
at the National University of Singapore: "There are
fewer social
pressures to stay married. You feel a bit freer to do
your own
thing."
In Singapore, the number of divorces is up a third since
1990, while
it has nearly doubled in Thailand. In Japan, a couple
gets married
every 42 seconds, but another couple will divorce before
2 minutes
are up. In the past 20 years, the divorce rate has
doubled in
mainland China and tripled in Taiwan. And the divorce
rate in South
Korea now exceeds that of many European countries,
including the
U.K., Denmark and Hungary. Even in India—where a wife
was once
considered so immutably tied to her husband that she was
thrown on
his funeral pyre if he died before she did—sociologists
estimate
that the divorce rate is 11 per 1,000, up from 7.41 per
1,000 in
1991.
Across the region, a battery of counselors, lawyers,
publishers and
relationship pundits has emerged in response to the
lucrative demand
for divorce. Pick up the lifestyle magazine of the
swanky Lane
Crawford department store in Hong Kong and you will be
cheerfully
informed that "three is the new two"—a reference to the
idea that
where once two marriages were considered acceptable,
it's now O.K.
to be married three times. On a quiet back street in
Tokyo's
sprawling suburbs, you can attend a divorce school to
learn the 50
ways to leave your lover. And in Taiwan, you can read
marriage
counselor Rachel Wang's tell-all chronicle of the
breakup of her own
marriage. Wang, who had previously penned popular books
on the
perfect relationship, says her relationship faltered
when she
learned that her husband was having an affair. "I felt
like God had
played a joke on me—a marriage counselor who couldn't
keep her
marriage intact." Now she wishes she had shed her qualms
about
divorce sooner: "I could have been happier if I had
divorced 10
years earlier." ...
Indeed, the willingness of many Asian women to view
their own needs
as secondary to those of their husbands is decreasing.
"Divorces are
on the increase because the younger generation has been
brought up
differently," says Uthaiwan Jamsutee, a public
prosecutor in
Thailand. "They are more individualistic. When they get
married, if
there is a problem, they tend to think more of their own
interests
instead of family harmony."
But the divorce boom is not merely a reflection of
generational
shifts. After all, in many parts of Asia it isn't just
sobbing
twentysomethings but much older couples who are breaking
up. The
children have grown up, the husband has retired or
retrenched, and
the wife weighs up her options—which are increasingly
likely to
include claiming half of her husband's retirement
package to start a
new, single life. There may be no overt conflict between
the
spouses, but that isn't the issue—fulfillment and the
search for
meaning are. Senior divorce has taken root with especial
tenacity in
Japan, where, like China, 70% of all divorces are
initiated by
women, and where a large senior population has plenty of
leisure
time and the wherewithal to ponder how they will spend
their
remaining years. In 1975, 6,810 Japanese couples
divorced after 20
years or more of marriage. In 2002, the total was
45,536. "I think
that one has to be happy in one's life," says Atsuko
Okano, a Tokyo-
based marriage consultant and author of A Perfect
Divorce
Manual. "If it takes a divorce to attain it, then I'm
all for it."
GETTING OUT (TIMEasia)
magazinehttp://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/501040405/story.html |
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