In mankind's earliest days the seeing of newcomers as "other" and possibly
dangerous served in many cases as a viable defense strategy. But hospitality
was just as viable a defense strategy, and tended to work better in the long
run, as new ideas and techniques could be shared between cultures and make
everyone more successful, comfortable, and well fed. It is when a particular
region begins to be overpopulated that we begin reverting to fear of the other,
allowing paranoia and prejudices to flourish and lead to internecine wars and
suppressions of others.
Bonnie Sherrell
----
On Tue, 30 May 2017 19:38:05 -0400, Miriam Vieni wrote:
Carl,ften enslaved the vanquished. This business of banding with one's kind and
OK. So let's substitute the word tribalism for racism and lets leave the
contemporary American scene behind. In 1986, I visited Kenya. By then, the
English Colonials were gone. The country was ruled by one party. That party
was composed of the people from one of the two dominant tribes in Kenya. There
had always been different tribes there, way before any English arrived, way
before western civilization raised its ugly head. And there were people of
the Muslim faith who had migrated from the Middle East. It wasn't white people
who captured black people and brought them to the African coast for transport
to the new world. African tribes had been fighting each other forever and
enslaving each other. Now there was a monetary incentive. But the point is
that the population was divided and the divisions had nothing to do with
Capitalism or class structure. The same thing was true on our continent. The
natives were divided into tribes and many of them fought each other and the
victors o
Miriam
