Xenophobia, Ethnocentricity, Us

Xenophobia, Ethnocentricity and Us

April 30, 2000

We are all born into a family and that family is often part of a tribe and that tribe is usually a part of a society: these and other cultural and environmental influences mold our personal worldview.

Orphans, by good or evil fortune, miss some of the conditioning that takes place in the traditional family, while children from alternative family backgrounds may not get their requisite dose of "mother, father, sisters and brothers, etc.", but the majority of us are normal.

Twentieth century mobility has weakened tribal ties and the recent semi-collapse of the nuclear family has altered the formative power it once exerted on the individual, but the rise of ubiquitous and mandatory public education (mental and physical control of the development of the citizen) has more than compensated, filling the void with commonwealth-serving political notions and necessary and unnecessary dogma.

Few, perhaps none, of us have escaped this conditioning: the smooth functioning of society demands that we all fit in and most of us unquestioningly do.

The national government advances its policy by requisitioning the language and the mores of its citizens and conveniently defines aliens as those humans who do not share these benefits and, as a matter of practicality, teaches suspicion, hatred and fear of the stranger, from whom not even the innocent child dare accept candy.

"The stranger": they speak some bogus gibberish instead of our elegant syllables, they wear absurd, laughable costumes unlike our stylish garments, they seldom have the pleasing color of skin we have and even their eyes are not the elegant shape of our fathers', our grandfathers' and our great grandfathers' eyes: they observe barbaric superstitious rites, we revere our divinely inspired religion: they are deluded while the pure sunshine of sweet reason enlightens our noble minds: they are notoriously lazy, living like filthy, drunken swine; we are vigorous, ambitious, moderate and fastidiously clean: they eat unwholesome, polluted rubbish; we eat tasty, nutritious, natural foods; it is a pity that most of them are so fat, while we are usually regally slim: we are jolly good fellows but even their humor is cold and ridiculous: their bizarre, promiscuous and disgusting sexual practices would corrupt even our own high moral standards if our women were not so chaste and refined nor our men so manly and dignified: they abandon their children and old folks, we adore and respect ours: they are lying, cheating scoundrels in their piddling, underhanded dealings while we are scrupulously fair and honest in our important business transactions: their treacherous spies strive hopelessly to infiltrate our secret installations as our intrepid secret agents cleverly abscond with their nefarious schemes and plans: they are craven cowards, while the whole world admires our legendary bravery, and when we, with reluctance, must go to war, we succor the weak, aid the defenseless and bring the blessings of freedom and our enlightened way of life to the downtrodden peoples in darkness; those warmongers on the other hand, blindly following their mad leaders, burn, loot, rape and destroy every trace of civilization with savage delight, bestowing only slavery on their unhappy victims. In fact, to every right-minded and non-prejudiced observer we are, in all humility, obviously superior in every way to them and, if our logic does not convince them that it is our manifest destiny to lead, theirs to follow; perhaps our bombs will.

In my travels I visited two tiny, impotent, adjacent banana republics in South America. They hated each other with ferocity unimaginable. Their incessant border conflicts wasted the lives of their youth and their meager substance but they rejoiced in their hatred. I learned never to mention, let alone praise the enemy country when resident in its opposite, though as an outsider, the postage stamp nations seemed identical to me in every poverty-stricken detail.

I was once arrested in a middle-eastern country as a spy from their neighboring implacably enemy state. They claimed I looked exactly like their imagined image of a spying minion of the hostile people across the border.

Sometime later, after being freed, I crossed the border into the "enemy" land where I was once again arrested as an obvious spy from the first country. They said I looked exactly like a spy from their detested neighbor.

The truth is that I looked like neither race in any respect! Prejudice filled in the physical details so totally lacking-because, after all, I was a stranger.

The planet shrinks and in this new little world we are all citizens: Like it or not, they are us.

Tomasito, 2008


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