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Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Ankara, Brussels....

Why can't we all get along? 


It is a stupid question in light of everything that is happening in the world. It might even be an ignorant question born of facile wishing. It certainly is a question that ignores some very basic things about being human. 

We can not control what others do. 
We can not all be made to be the same, having another's will imposed on us.
And we all think we are right. And righteous.

The imposition of a Will to subjugate others always goes badly. To function as a society we have to agree to some very basic rights and privileges  of being human. Food, water, air, clean housing, clothing, and to an extent the right to self determination. It doesn't get more basic than that. But it does get a hell of a lot more complicated.

Enter Personality. 
We can not all be made to sit in silence. Some of us need visual stimulation and others need music. The type of art, the type of music is going to be as subjective as a choice of favorite color, book, star in the heavens. We all are internally soothed and motivated in accord with a Personality. That personality chooses our hair color, clothing, furnishings for the home, job we would prefer to have and the way which we perform the jobs we actually have. There are rules of conduct that are basic to function in society, but there is much diversity within those structures as well. 

When it comes to the governance of society, where lines have to be drawn to separate the public from the private life each one of us gets a bit self righteous. As human beings we are more comfortable in the thought that every other person out there is just like us. Imagine the culture shock of the first photos in National Geographic as the colorful subsaharan region became known among the staid colonialists. Opening trade routes and colonizing another land is all well and good until the kids come home with tattoos. Now suddenly God has an opinion on body art that is defensible by the sword. The minute we come into contact with another there is a battle of wills to assert one personality over another.

Look at the minor conflicts and the struggles to remain true to the self that you know to be authentic in your personal life. Beginning with your siblings and parents. Now magnify that on the world stage where so much more than your Legos are at stake. We are all siblings. But that sibling relationship didn't matter much when you were fighting over toys. The parent child relationship doesn't matter much when you Only Children are fighting for autonomy over sneakers and dresses or clashing patterns. When you want what you want and you are the kind of person who has to have their own way ALL THE TIME no relationship matters. Magnify this. Move the conflict onto a remote stage, in a land you don't know, with people who aren't your color and who believe different things, who still appreciate their past and believe in their own right and worth as strongly as you do.

We can not get along because we chose not to.
We chose to look at the foreign ideas and differing values as a battleground.
We chose to exclude rather than include because we are so afraid of diminishing ourselves that we can't add to ourselves. Our nature as spoiled brats, no matter what country we live in, has been exploited for generations and generations in the name of resource control. All of this fighting is pointless. None of it will keep us alive any longer than the natural span of a human life. None of it improves the quality of anyone's life. In fact, all we are doing is shortening the life span of every sigle person on the planet.

That serves no one's God.

The God of Moses, the God of Abraham, the God of Muhamed, the Father of Christ is a creator before he is anything else. And when we destroy his creation we destroy him. The first job we had was to shepard his creation. All of the things that come after as a result of the actions that humans took in relationship to each other and him. We are living the consequences of forgetting that nothing came from our own hands. The struggle to place one God above another is an excuse and a gross absolution of our behavior.

The result of being irresponsible for our own actions is the mayhem we see around the world today.

I am an altruist.
I am a Humanist.
I the tapestry that we weave by mingling our cultures and think that we have one of the most beautiful experiences a person can have. Then I see things like this in Ankara and Brussels, the blemishes on the tapestry, the holes and frayed edges and I see that we are not going to last for very long. I know whey we all can't get along. And I think that makes us the most stupid, ignorant and useless things that God has ever made. We are perfectly capable of being so much better than we are and we chose not too.

I am sad for everyone. 

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