In Buddhism good actions perpetuated good outcomes for the giver and motivated goodness in the receiver. And yet as important as it was for fools and the ignorant to believe in this replicating of virtue when with each new century mankind moved the world closer to the abyss, the reality was that they who had education and wealth gave both to their children for that accrued competitive advantage, that the poor floundered about trying to free themselves from a vortex, that suffering did not propitiate any god, that the meek did not inherit anything, and that they who were literal throwaways as children would sell themselves as prostitutes, get AIDS, and die hideously in the streets, emaciated incrementally like starving dogs. She could see the prostitutes near the National Monument with its hard rockish flame like the torch of the Statue of Liberty. She felt empathy for them as deep as the gods and it was a torturous perspective indeed. When she saw a bare-breasted homeless woman running down the sidewalk outside the monument, all depraved from wandering around aimlessly, screaming and looking behind her as if chased, Gabriele had a mixed reaction. In a small way, she saw sanity in this defying of convention that a woman's boobs were erotic armaments which, unless locked away in a blouse and a brassiere, would thwart assiduous man to recidivistic patterns where his amorous instincts would cause him to malinger from work. But there was nothing sane in this woman's plight, and any thought suggesting that there was such had been from a desire to fortify herself from the perspective that the world was a bad place. She imagined her face on this woman and wanted to abscond from Jakarta and life as a whole. She just wanted to rest her head thoughtlessly against a man's chest. She wanted to close her eyes to the injustices and the inequality of life and to float in the levity of dreams this way. Lonely as she was, the net was pulling her back home to America and New York State.