Human Beings First... and Crazy Too!

More unrest in the world.  There is always unrest.  Lots of unhappy people in the world, and sometimes they express their unhappiness and hatred in terribly gruesome and inhuman ways.  It is true.  But when I hear sentences that begin like this, I bristle like a goddamn porcupine...

"The Muslims..."  "The Jews..." "The Blacks..." 

To me these types of sentences are part of the problem.  They imply that the sentence-maker doesn't see the complex world we live in, and doesn't see that we are all human beings first.  It is the language of defining and distancing ourselves from "the other."  This is the language of racism, prejudice and stereotype...

Of course the world is made up of human beings and some of them are Muslims, Jews, Blacks, etc. So sometimes those words are just descriptors, identifiers.  The problem is when lots of people are lumped together and judged as one thing.  This is not helpful.  It helps perpetuate unhappiness and hatred.  And of course, it's just not true of the world we live in!  There is vast variation in all these human "categories."  

I can't help it.  I am with the Dali Lama: "Human Beings First."  Now, of course, in my book Human Beings are fundamentally CRAZY.  It's kind of built into our psychic make-up.  We put on the mask of rationality, but we are born into a mysterious and strange world, and our lives can be snatched away at a moment's notice.  We are capable of amazingly beautiful things and horrifyingly terrible things too.  All of us.  Any time.  And if we do something beautiful, we should be celebrated, and if we do something horrible, we should be held accountable.  Just review the history of the world.  Any category of human you can name. There's lots of beauty, and an unbelievable list of crimes and horrors.  Human Beings did that!