Chocolate, Chicken, Color, Creed – Who Cares?

Last updated on: July 15, 2016 at 8:23 am by Gerard A. Murphy

Chocolate, Chicken, Color, Creed – Who Cares? 2016-07-15T08:23:04-04:00 Gerard A. Murphy

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Bear Pic

No, I’m not being facetious. The picture and caption drive home a fundamental truth our society is reluctant to learn: our obsession with compartmentalizing – especially when applied to the human family – is literally killing us.

How much more mob violence or discriminatory police shootings will it take before we get this? Not to mention rampant racial profiling and inflammatory political effluence from presumptive presidential candidates.

Categorizing and sub-categorizing everything from food to languages, while understandable from a human rationalist mindset, is self-defeatist when used to excess. And that’s what we’re doing repeatedly. Thus perpetuating the myth of separation in collective consciousness. And sadly and tragically reaping what we sow . .

Who cares?

And what are we supposed to do with the online job applications that insist on CategoriesNotRaces asking us to check the box corresponding to our skin color and/or ethnicity? Who the heck cares? Who needs to know and why? Black, white, yellow, or pink, we are essentially One Human Race. We’re not aliens from another planet.

But that’s how many of us are made to feel. I’ve been in the U.S. for 17 years. So it’s probably time for me to become a full blown citizen. Like many others, up to this point, cost was a major factor in my foregoing the process. Meanwhile I (like millions of others in the U.S.) enjoy Resident Alien Status. That’s right: we all have our Alien #’s just in case we forget that we’re not actually human (or civilian) until we become U.S. citizens!

Language is literally a killer . .

Separation and Isolation

The recent Brexit fiasco in the U.K. serves as another example of our losing our way. Meaning? It does nothing but fuel the separatist and isolationist ideology that Britain and many other nations believe is in their best interests.

Seriously, how many more centuries will it take for our world leaders to realize that the polarization of the human community; and our alienation from each other, nature, and the whole created order is damaging and detrimental to the extreme?

The days of dualistic thinkiing – one would think – are long over. But nope; we still cling to our dualistic terminology: achiever/non-achiever; believer/infidel; able-bodied /disabled; feminist theology/patriarchal theology; us/them; black/white; developed/under-developed; you get my drift . .

In the final analysis

In centuries to come we will look back on our nation states, separatist terminology, and dualistic thinking and wonder: how the heck did it take so long for us to accept that these are misguided human constructs that never have, never will, and can never promote the healing, justice, peace, and integrity of creation that our beleaguered world is presently crying out for?

I hope and pray that we can notch it down by a few centuries.

Cover Photo: Starecat.com

Image Insert: Pewresearch.org

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