Walls and Bridges

In a previous entry, I explored the many global conflicts that seem due to tribalistic bonding--and how such bondings particularly manifest in the face of perceived danger. The more I ponder this phenomenon, the more pervasive (and destructive) it seems to be. A newspaper article last week, detailed how Shiites and Sunnis in the more war-torn areas of Iraq have increasingly segregated into discrete neighborhoods--uprooting families, neighbors, businesses, and friends that had peacefully co-existed for decades before.

Now, portions of Kenya are in the throes of similar ethnic strife. The aftermath of a disputed presidential election, with violent clashes between the Luo and Kikuyu tribes, has led to the death of hundreds, and the displacement of over 250,000. To quote a Los Angeles Times article--“All over Kenya, people are packing up and leaving their houses, perhaps forever, in the aftermath of tribal violence triggered by the country's disputed presidential election. Friendships are disintegrating, borders are being drawn, and markets where people once shopped together are no-go zones for one tribe or another. Saturday, under the protection of paramilitary police, people shuttled from one side to another, carrying furniture, bedding, bags and pots as they steadily divided themselves by tribe. On one side of the bridge, in the Ghetto, no Luos can live. On the other, in a place called Mathare North, no Kikuyus. They couldn't have gone about the task more efficiently had the government decreed it. ‘Across there we cannot cross. A Kikuyu will never cross into that area. There is a border there,’ said Margaret Wawira Wanjiru, 30, from the Ghetto.”

Across the globe, we find such walls and borders being erected. The Israelis are building a wall to supposedly protect themselves from the Palestinians. American conservatives want to build a wall to supposedly protect us from Mexicans. And now the Kenyans are drawing similar borders and barriers. But they simply won’t work. The building of walls is no longer a viable means of dealing with our problems. We’re all too inter-connected. We have to somehow start thinking in terms of bridges.

Already, those who seek to find an “Islamo-facism” link to any world conflict are uncovering tenuous connections between the minority Muslims in Kenya and one of the contested Presidential candidates. And now further connections are being drawn in terms of Barak Obama having met with this candidate several years back. The reverberations of tribal bonding are spreading outward from the original conflict, like ripples in a pond, breeding animosity in its wake.

Those who assert that “religion poisons everything” (at least, any religion other than their own), regularly claim that religious conflict lies at the root of everything from the mistreatment of women, to wars, to genocides. But from simply reading the daily headlines, the clear fact of the matter is that the real poison lies within us all, and will not be purged until we can somehow see beyond primitive tendencies that once served a vital role in our survival, but which now threaten that very survival.

I’m reminded of the character, General Jack D. Ripper, in “Dr. Strangelove,” the brilliant political satire film made by Stanley Kubrick in the 60s. General Ripper, after ordering a rogue nuclear first-strike on the Soviet Union, details to a military colleague his theory that the Russians were trying to poison the U.S. via the fluoridation of water--thereby “sapping our precious bodily fluids.” “…I first became aware of it during the physical act of love,” states Ripper. “Luckily, I was able to interpret these feelings correctly.”

We humans like to think that we’re far more logical and rational than we really are. In reality, as with the Ripper character, we often think something first, and then look for a rationalization for those feelings.

As the bumper sticker on my car says--“Don’t Believe Everything You Think.”