The Others

I just finished reading short lectures given by Polish glob trotting journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski at the Vienna Institute For Human Sciences. The topic: The Others. It is a fascinating look at how we relate to people who are different from us, racially, culturally, nationally.

It strikes me, that the Europeans especially, have looked at other people and other cultures paternistically at best, as a resource to fuel their thirst for wealth and power at worst. Throughout centuries the French, the Spanish, the British, and others, sent the worst element from their societies overseas to spread the Christian values with the sword and the fire. We will live with the consequences of these brutal actions forever, just to mention the genocide of the indigenous people in the Americas and Australia or the African slave trade. These people were not looked at by the Europeans as Humans, they deserved to die simply because they were The Others.

But we don't need to look back in time to be appalled by how some groups of people treat other groups of people, simply because they are different. In the age of instantaneous electronic communication that literally shrank the globe and created huge network of interconnections between people, we see attempts to build walls to separate people from each other. One example is the wall between Israel and the West Bank, another example is the southern border of the US. These are pathetic attempts to keep The Others away from us, because we are obviously better, better looking, more intelligent, wealthier, our religion is better, in all possible respects The Others are not worthy of living among us, they would take our money, they would pollute our gene pool, they would desecrate our religion. Not to mention that they speak this strange language that nobody can understand (as Kapuscinski noted, the word 'barbarian" comes from Greek "barbaros", which means somebody who just mumbles incoherently). So we build walls around our domains, we capture and expel those that came to live among us illegally.

Kapuscinski cites three types of group behaviors towards The Others: you either subjugate them (the colonial powers, or like the US and UK are trying to do in Iraq), or you separate from them (the Great Wall of China, southern US border, Israel), or you try to live with them in harmony (what would be a good example of that?).

One would think that Humanity reached the maturity level needed for harmonious living of The Others among us, but then maybe we still need more time...

Do:

• Every day take a minute or two to reflect on how things worked out, what went well, what would you have done differently.