Who We Are

What does Al Qaeda look like?

What color are their uniforms? Do they march in elaborate formations? Is it tough to goose-step in sand? What are their names and ranks? Do they have medal pinning ceremonies and a roster of evil heroes? I can't seem to find out. They certainly aren't like that other upstart group, the Nazis, who really knew how to market themselves. Heck, there's little we don't know about them. But we hear so much about Al Qaeda and this is the information age so you'd figure...

Who are the Iraqis? Do they all have moustaches and gesticulate angrily when cameras are pointed at them? Do they all carry machine guns? Why do the women often beat themselves about the head and breast? Hard to know if there are any more subtle aspects to being Iraqi. Is there an Iraqis for Dummies I can buy on Amazon?

What's Darfur? And do all African people in general either stand around starving or ride in open Jeeps waving machetes? When do they eat and sleep? Do they eat and sleep? Are they even real? And for that matter who are the Palestinians, the Israelis, the French, the Iranians, the Russians? And who are the Americans? And why can't we really see any of them, really know any of them as independent persons with ordinary lives before they are transformed by the media into faceless, brainless representations of a generalized description of a vague personification of a blanket ideology? Contact with any of these groups is like strolling through The Museum of The Others and pausing to consider a framed portrait or landscape for just a moment, deciding whether we are moved in any way or not and then proceeding on to the next one until we get bored, look at our watches and go home. Why can't we seem to think that any of these people were once babies born to straining mothers who, in the moment of giving birth, were one with the universe and with nature and who, at the moment of their death, will be one with the universe and nature again, ineluctably bound to the cosmic continuum? (Wow. And I don't even smoke pot. Well, I used to but not anymore. Really.)

More pleonastic questions: why is the essential humanity of each of the people who make up these groups ultimately denied? Is it an instinctual mechanism for survival to remain in distinct tribes destined never to perceive a "rival" tribe's similarities to their own lest there be a state of harmonious interconnection that flies in the face of the natural tendency to distrust? Is xenophobia a necessity that actually regulates humanity so that it never attains true awareness? Perhaps recognition of one's own mortality would lead to premature demise; the attendant ignorance of the swollen ego fills the being with the false hope that its existence will continue unabated. But if the personal characteristics of the the individuals comprising a larger group are defined and acknowledged, then previously assumed differences between groups might actually vanish, and with them any incentive to survive... profitably.

Oh, there's evil out there, acquired and developed through dehumanization and despair. But before evil there is innocence, inherent in every individual, apparent if the effort is made to discover it, triumphant if the individual is allowed to express it. In this age of information, we must make an attempt to understand the basic needs of the individual before we engage the group to which it is assigned and the principles it espouses, to render as impotent grand generalizations that do nothing but promote fear and dystopia.

To recall the words spoken by that virtually forgotten and much maligned individual some forty-plus years ago but who seemed to represent a generation of Americans that is itself all but a quaint memory: "We all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

Isn't that what we really look like?