Chris and I met in Ankara and, following our marriage, travelled widely all over Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. At the time, Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East. Mediterranean scenery, Roman and Greek ruins, delicious cuisine, and delightful people. Teheran was trying to emerge from being a backward Middle Eastern conglomeration of tribal interests into a modern European style country with courts, lawyers and judges. Kabul was still a cultural desert, but was unique in its’ backwardness. That was half a century ago. Today, Beirut is the home of Hezbollah, an arm of Radical Islam, Teheran is the center of Islam’s current attack on western civilization, and Kabul is about to reinstitute stoning of women for adultery.
Meanwhile, here in this country, we are righting all wrongs done by our ancestors, inviting the world to come live with us, and refusing to talk to each other about anything other than whatever our tribal masters permit us to discuss. The current list includes the age of the fetus, the price of gasoline, the proper use of pronouns, the number of chips in the bag, and our precious feelings. Jerusalem and Teheran are engaged in the 2024 iteration of a war that has been going on literally for millennia, and we are playing the exact same role that crusading Christian knights played centuries ago on the exact same turf, with pretty much the exact same ineffectiveness. The absolutely fascinating aspect of the situation, that we fail to comprehend, is that we now possess the capability to impose a “final solution” to the age old struggle between Europe and the Middle East. Some will say Christianity and Islam. I won’t quibble with either analysis, but my own is slightly different. I believe that the irritant that threatens society is technology and the inability of human groups to accommodate to it, compounded by the fact that humans are prone to multiply like rabbits.
Humans are engaged in the same killing spree that is going on in the Middle East in other parts of the world as well. Not all violence involves Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Tigrayan and Amaran people continue to kill each other just as enthusiastically and for exactly the same fundamental reasons, but with entirely different ethnic window dressing than clothe Jews and Arabs. Having said that, I must also acknowledge that much of the current conflict in Africa has important roots in Islam’s historic effort to proselytize Black Africa. Humanity has some fundamental issues that none of our various societal efforts have been able to deal with successfully and “advances” in technology are increasing the adverse impact of our various disagreements. I suggest that our own domestic racial problems are rooted in the same ultimate stupidity that plagues other societies all over the world and, ironically, our current efforts at protecting diversity are prolonging and exacerbating the fundamentals of what is destroying us.
I conclude that the root problem is human stupidity, but that is an unacceptable charge. All Americans know for a fact that we are not stupid. People living in the shit hole countries are stupid. We Americans have gone to school and have degrees and certificates to prove that we have completed multiple layers of “education.” Some of us have invented things. Our problem is that we are equating education with intelligence. They are not the same thing and neither one of them are experience. We are nice folks. By-in-large we mean well. As a society, we are better educated than most in the world today. Very few of us are aware of how intellectually isolated we are. How strong the intellectual buffer between us and what is going on in the rest of the world. We genuinely believe that television, the internet, and the non-stop emersion in facts and figures, adequately educates us about life outside of our cultural bubble that we can govern ourselves satisfactorily in a “democracy,” wherein we blindly accept what some two-bit politician tells us because he is a fellow tribe-member. I sincerely wish that it were so, but it is not, and I suggest that as that becomes obvious to us, our instinct is to blame each other for the problem. This introduces the societal division that is currently destroying what was the least bad society in the entire history of mankind.
We can fix the problem, but it will require that we take our masks off, sit down with each other, and vigorously apply our educations to real life problems with an eye to societal priorities rather than personal preferences. Very unfortunately there is absolutely no indication that we have the slightest inclination to do that.
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