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The Next 500 Years
The participants in this unique dialogue may have been doing no less than opening the window on the next 500 years.
As scary and stupefying as our world sometimes seems, we are at a place of enormous potential right now -- a transition point of unprecedented understanding among cultures and peoples and worldviews. Pushing that understanding, creating, in the words of the late physicist David Bohm, a milieu of "participatory consciousness" among radically diverse thinkers, is the idea behind the Language of Spirit Conference, sponsored by the SEED Graduate Institute, which has been held in Albuquerque every year since 1999.
Last week I attended the 12th annual Language of Spirit Conference, which brought together Western scientists and scholars and Native North American and Australian scientists, philosophers and storytellers, not to argue, but to grope for commonality at the far reaches of their belief systems. The original dialogues, convened by Bohm and Leroy Little Bear (former director of Native Studies at Harvard) in Kalamazoo, Mich., in 1992, came about because Little Bear, who was well-versed in the developments of quantum physics, realized that Western science had reached the end of linear thought and finally got it: The universe is a living, conscious, interconnected organism.
This is how the world's indigenous people see things. They always have. Reverently tied to place, they have been the natural world's caretakers for thousands of years. They are of the world, living not just sustainably but in intimate relationship with their sacred piece of Planet Earth.
"We are a people who never made singing or dancing unrespected ways of knowing," said Pat McCabe, a Navajo writer and scholar who also goes by the name Woman Stands Shining. "All of the five-fingered ways of knowing remained open to us."
And now . . . now . . . 500 years after Western conquistadors subdued and divided the planet, devastating indigenous people on every continent and, while they were at it, pushing the natural world to the brink of eco-collapse, we are turning -- some of us -- to the wisdom of connectedness that has been ours for the asking all along.
This isn't easy or simple. Our disconnect from one another, from ourselves and from the natural world is embedded in the Western languages, which break the world into millions of discrete, manipulable pieces, called nouns ("My name is Matthew. I'm a nounaholic," cried linguist Matthew Bronson). Westerners control reality through language, but they don't evoke it. Indigenous languages are, as I am slowly coming to understand them, verb-based, intrinsically linking speaker and object in a flow of motion that cannot be linguistically sliced and diced.
Just as I began writing this column, the New Yorker arrived in the mail. On the cover of the Aug. 30 issue is a drawing of a middle-aged white guy sitting on a beach chair at the edge of the ocean, smugly pointing a TV remote at it -- perfectly illustrating the disconnected, control-fixated Westerner the Language of Spirit Conference was addressing . . . the one who has done so much harm.
With eerie synchronicity, the water on the New Yorker cover flows back to the dialogue. Speaking about the BP oil spill, SEED founder Glenn Aparicio Parry noted in amazement, "The mainstream world believes that water is dead -- yet we're 70 percent water."
"The assumption of the laws (of science)," said biophysicist Beverly Rubik, "is that we're a non-living universe. We ought to start over. We have a science that starts with deadness. It's time to revision science -- in a living universe."
These words begin to get at the vibration of the conference -- this exercise in participatory consciousness -- which struck at the core of something vital. The ostensible subject of the 12th Language of Spirit dialogue was time. The speakers dismantled linear time, the kind that moves in a straight line and pulls us along on its track. (In the U.S., time wasn't standardized till 1886, when the railroads demanded it.) Nonlinear time -- the timelessness of dreaming, reverence, prayer and awe -- filled the room, and I could feel the living universe pulse. It pulsed with love.
"The eagle is more valuable to you alive" than as merely a source of feathers, said Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan. "The sacred thing is the life force."
It also pulsed with anger. Writer M.J. Zimmerman, speaking about SEED spiritual mentor Leon Secatero, who died in 2008, said: "Grandfather Leon always talked about getting ready for the next 500 years. We're in a transition point. The anger of colonization should not be brought into the next 500 years.
"Hurt people hurt people," she added. "Europeans have moved into every part of this planet and hurt people." She offered the plea that we in the disconnected West find our own roots, dig "way back into our own traumatic history" and begin to heal our brokenness.
And for the first time in my life I found myself groping in the darkness of my own past, beyond a few generations of known ancestors and beyond my identity as an American, toward an ancient tribal commonality that has fallen out of history, and I felt a slow give in the assumptions of my life.
"Everyone is indigenous," said Jill Milroy, dean of the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia. Perhaps knowing this is the first step in envisioning the next 500 years.
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268 Comments so far
Show AllFor those who love physics, try this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/does-the-past-exist-yet-e_b_683103.html
To me it sort of describes what these people are trying to bring about. (don't let the HuffPost throw you off, this is a science article)
Wonderful article! Thank you for posting.
"Americans seem to have a penchant for buying 'spiritual' products torn out of Buddhism, indigenous culture, and other scattered and outlying religious traditions."
Outlying religious traditions? As in, non-Judeo/Christian religions? So, was the time before the European age really "pre"history?
I don't get it.
The author is speaking to our disconnectedness, as opposed to being connected - to the rest of the natural world, to each other, and to the workings of the universe. Pooh pooh them all you want, but all you are doing is further disconnecting yourself.
P.S. Water is not dead. Even our science knows this.
Exactly. ALL forms in the multidimensional Cosmos are modifications of a single underlying Living Consciousness-Energy. And "Thou art That."
ALL of our problems - and I do mean ALL of them - stem from the fact that we have lost our connection with this Source of ALL.
Kataj - lovely gibberish nonetheless, though I believe "ThinkingOutside" was being sarcastic, not literal.
Direct experience is available to those who want it. Thousands of years of experimental reports from esoteric spirituality and entheogenic/psychedelic shamanism.
Repeat: direct experience is available. Such claims are NOT based on mere belief without evidence.
Kataj -
Have you met Sue Rows??? aka Siouxrose(Injuns R US). You should talk.
Justice -
NO, just someone with a still functioning brain.
I think I think, therefore I probably am.
Someone with only a functioning brain is running on one cylinder.
Don't be so quick to call things you have not experienced 'lovely gibberish'. If we had more lovely gibberish we would not be in the dire straights in which we find ourselves.
Thank you. I've always appreciated your evenhandedness and good reasoning.
No worrys, there is no source of all never was. Turns out the Big Bang is no more than a cross dimentional exchange of energy and mass. We had it wrong, again. Thats science always evolving. Unlike religious tennents that are set in stone, and must be accepted by faith.
I do like the part about not holding grudges, my people were run out by the patato famine, before that enslaved by Saxon Lords, before that butchered by Vikings. When do you stop blameing others for your bad attittude?
As far as the religious noise, take it or leave it. In my expirence most people never do entirly give up leaning on something..
Have a good day
>^^<
Ted, what ardent means is that materialism is not the same as spiritualism. You're right about the disconnect but you contradict yourself when you mention water not being dead. Ardent may not look like he's naturally connected and maybe the same could be said of most others on this forum but they do give us a better view of what's really wrong with the picture and why people feel rubbed the other way. Going to your example on water, sure it's not dead but thanks to privatizing it into bottles for sale, oil spills, and other industrial pollution contaminating the beauty of water on this planet, it's getting to be as good as dead. That makes it more difficult for people to have faith in connecting to one another.
I wouldn't say that even our culture is necessarily stupid. In my part of the country where I come from, if you're stranded and need help, a good Samaritan is ready to come and help, whether it's fixing your car so that you'll at least make it to the nearest repair shop or getting you to the nearest emergency room if you are in serious condition. Now ask them what they think of government and the need to bring about fair policies for all and they'll scream "socialist". I don't think they're disconnected but their mistrust of government is misplaced. What they don't get is that government is working against us and for the corporate interests. There in lies the disconnect there too. If most of the wingnuts in my area screaming anti-government were instead like ardent or at least halfway there, we wouldn't be losing water to privatization and contamination to where it no longer stays water. We cannot take water for granted and it does matter what gets done to it. If it didn't, would any of us be outraged at the BP oil spill?
I agree that people's rights have been stolen from them but when I said misplaced trust, I had meant their trusting the wrong people and/or mistrusting for wrong reasons. I just can't seem to figure out how people become selectively sensitive about what gets stolen. Out here in Tulsa, the only time people would complain about the Constitution being shredded is when someone brings up gun control which I support. Otherwise, they're fine with letting our politicians trash it. The only other time they mention the Constitution is when they say that health care for all, reproductive rights, public education, etc... are not in the Constitution to justify rightwing positions. Bank of America could get away with dirty deals and nobody would bother stopping them but if a pregnant teen looks as if she wants to terminate her unexpected pregnancy, then suddenly they go after her as if she's the big criminal when they should be focusing their anger and suspicion on greedy CEOs playing us all for money. The psyops propaganda machine seems to have worked really well for the ruling class.
It is possible to convince even moderate conservatives into taking civil liberties, aside from guns, seriously. Is there a way that you think you can convince them into thinking differently despite what they have been conditioned into accepting as right vs wrong? I don't know Tulsa but the location is irrelevant. Even the deepest of red places can turn out of a lot more soft hearts. You have to be confident in what you can do as well. That is what the author is making a point on.
"The only real possible antidote for overreaching corporate control of gov't is that the people become aware of the manipulations and reclaim their gov't to serve their interests and the greater common good."
Well said - a point i have tried to make elsewhere, but not so well as you have done ...
"The best way to convince people to give up on the only power larger than the corporations, is to convince them that gov't cannot do anything to ameliorate their circumstances."
Thank you, again!
i would add to that not only that gov't cannot do anything but that gov't, per se, IS the problem, and that the only thing to do is withdraw from the political process altogether rather than fixing it. I see that view expressed a lot here ....
"government", with a small g, is simply a way by which people organize themselves to get something done, so I would have to suggest that it is more than "window dressing", unless of course one understands that one always winds up dressing one's windows in some way, with a frame, or a curtain, or tinting, etc.
We, as a species, always seem to choose some type of government, whether on a tribal, a regional, a national level, and it is with this thought in mind that I defend my belief in the absolute necessity of being involved in the process of forming, choosing and being involved in the process by which we do this governing, which involvement, in its simplest most basic form, is all that "politics" is.
"The gov't may appear to have an existence separate from the PEOPLE, but that is really an illusion, as we provide a continuous barrage of identifications to prop that up.
When the people united take up their real power ( not requiring the force of arms ), there is nothing that can withstand that force."
Whole hearted and unreserved "Amen" to that ....a proposition that i have been arguing for for some time .....
The "water is...'dead'" statement is quite meaningless, unless you'd care to define the 'alive' which it's not.
The water lives. The rocks live. The wind? It lives.
If you reduce these things to their components--or treat them as components--you disconnect.
Water is alive, because without it, we are dead.
Rocks are alive for the same reason. Don't think so? Try building a planet upon which you evolve without them.
Reductionist thinking permits us to pollute water, to the breaking point--NOW it IS dead--and the earth and the skies.
Dig?
Investing the material world with life and meaning is fetishism.
This world has not been created for US and nor are WE it's reason for being.
Anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism hasto stop.
We can live in harmony with the world without making ourselves the centre.
And it doesn't mean we lose all wonder and appreciation of the world either. The thought of being part of something wonderful and beautiful should be enough for anyone.
I believe it is called animism, not fetishism.
TKO ID and Sabo-
I am sorry, but Morticia is absolutely correct... it is fetishism.
Something the human species seems predetermined to do.
When you fully consider... the non-entity, cipher, George W Bush even became a "fetish".
It's called God-Realization. And It is quite Real.
Kataj - "It's called God-Realization. And It is quite Real."
Are you refering to George W. Bush? I believe he thought the same... and you can see where that got us.
"I believe it is called animism, not fetishism."
You're right - it is. And animism never did to this planet what anthropocentrism and egocentrism have.
You don't know me , you don't know my past nor what I have experienced.
One thing I will share. I have died from cardiac arrest and was brought back.
I remained and remain firm in my atheism.
I thought I wrote about spirituality, you know, the wonder of the world and all that.
And cut the post modern use of physics to explain your new age beliefs . It's crap.
try reading this, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense
Yes and thank you on the animism. My vocabulary escaped me.
Justice Arcs -
I was NOT born yesterday! If you are a physicist, as you claim, then I am an UberDiety from a paralell universe and I place a Cosmic Curse upon your pathetic humanbased assembly of particles (which you know nothing of).
JA - you make zero sense at all in your interminable ramblings. You are not fooling anybody here.
NAMASTE
Morticia -
You were correct nonetheless - it is pure fetishism, by definition.
Morticia - "And cut the post modern use of physics to explain your new age beliefs . It's crap."
Beautiful - nothing more to say!
Glad you are back and still an atheist... who says there is no justice in this world?
Please keep on these multiple CD threads - your observations are gold.
We almost have something in common; I quit breathing from too much oxygen and woke up in the ICU on a ventilator. That's similar, anyway. Still an atheist, could have become a vegetable.
I have long understood animism as the belief that things are alive and the use of that as an explanatory principle, as in Native American belief systems. It becomes animism when applied to rocks, water and such that a more recent view classifies a inanimate. I would not like to abandon the distinction.
Quantum theory at the proper level may be OK, I am not qualified to judge that, but as applied wholesale at macro levels it's out of place. Space is not seething with energy, and even if it were there's no way to harness it. I do strongly suspect that energy is to be had from inertia and hope to prove that before much longer.
Namaste,
These are interesting ideas, but no physicist (that I've ever heard of) would follow you claim that vacuum energy is alive. (e.g. ""Empty" space is loaded to the brim with vast populations of subatomic life"). This is simply not true. It's fascinating nonetheless: virtual particles spontaneously come into existence (e.g., a positron and electon) , annihilate one another, releasing energy. It seems to me that these events are wonderful enough in themselves, without having to endow them with life or spirituality. Life requires much more complex biochemical events.
At the end you claim that "your language determines what thoughts .... etc.". Again, not too many cognitive psychologists or linguists would agree with this. They might say language can influence thoughts, but certainly not determine them. Most psychologists would argue for multiple kinds of "thoughts", with language being just one (very efficient) kind. Others would include: pure conceptual thought (thinking in terms of abstract concepts without word labels), imagery (thinking in terms of images (e.g., visual images, maps, etc. with no words activated), and at least for some, bodily forms of thought which would include things like thinking in terms of motor responses, emotional feelings, and so on.
Sorry to have to correct these things, since you are one of the few who even seems interested in science. But it's very easy to push it too far. I think that the kinds of things you mention tell us very little about life, but they do make it all the more interesting.
Justice Arcs
I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you are talking about. You might look into Max Tegmarks' work, a highly credible cosmologist form MIT. He believes that for all of the different mathematical systems we can dream up, a universe exists based on that math. This way you could have all the laws of physicals and brains you want - just not in this universe.
As I had explained to farmgirl in another post, earlier physicists thought beyond numbers when they based their theories. Galileo, Kepler, and even Isaac Newton did not restrict their theories to calculations alone. Science has been undergoing too revisions to fit the corporate agenda from creationism and intelligent design to GMO to going nuclear on energy. Mathematics, while not necessarily a bad thing, can be used to abuse and control a populace. Just look at how the media manipulates the polling as I am beginning to learn. Worse, look at how government manipulates their numbers to fudge the status of our nation. My niece, JenniferB, would be happy to explain how finance and accounting are used for crooked purposes.
Wasn't it Mark Twain who said, "Figures don't lie, but liars can figure"?
Yes, that was MT who said that quote now that I googled it. I find a lot of interesting articles reference that quote as well. Thanks.
Morticia -
Beautiful... truly beautiful.
You have distilled the argument down to its essence.
That's right, get your ire out. You have plenty of cause. But everyone comes from an indigenous group of some kind. At one time, not so long ago, even Europeans belonged to small nomadic and semi nomadic tribes that greatly resembled tribes in the rest of the word. It would be nice if what's left of the tribal peoples of the 'New World' helped their errant European cousins to a better consciousness, instead of being 'pissed off'.
ardent 1 -
Thank you... you saved me writing the same.
This is all so much "feel good" gobblygook... we are all one, we are all indigenous, we are all the sacred water... nonsense.
We are fucked up human beings living in a fucked up world because we simply refuse to take responsibility for ourselves... instead we let fucked up criminals who have a love for money and comfort and penchant for abuse and violence rule and dictate to us. If you can't see the logical outcome of a sytem such as this... then WTF.
What is needed is a violent revolution whereby the shitbags are hung by their nutsacks and used as pinata's.
If you think an appeal to our inner wisdom, inner-indigenousness, is going to overthrow a psychotic military empire... well, keep reading Robert Koehler.
The problem is, hanging people by their nutsacks and using them as pinatas would make you, too, a shitbag, so to be consistent, you'd have to do the same to yourself, and you'd look pretty ridiculous hanging upside-down like that, trying to whack yourself over the head with a stick.
John M - I'd still be happy to try!
but that is only if one maintains a clinging to the "traditions" created in time by separations of people .
isn't the "trick" of the surival AND prosporing of the human species achieving the global knowledge that we are after all ONE species?
as some science researchers have shown after SEVERAL years of separate studies all over the globe says:
"ultimately -- right down to our very genes -- we ARE ALL AFRICANS".
that is the same as we are or were all "indigenous" one way or another.
I am with you teddy. We should recognize that we are all Africans (one hell of a large group of Africans), a group composed of many small groups that developed in isolation and that have beliefs, practices, and behaviors that may conflict when we try to build a common society together. So developing from this point an integrated, harmonious, and healthy group is a formidable challenge and the odds are against us.
However, the focus of Western societies, the Western group, on developing a precise and detailed understanding of specific properties of the physical universe so that certain tasks can be performed very effectively and efficiently does not necessarily conflict with a focus on considering the effect of actions on the whole, a focus some of the non-Western groups may share, but instead is complementary to it and the coming together of groups with such complementary goals could potentially create a stronger and more balanced super group.
Now if we can just get the corporatists out of the way...
Kivals...a geneticist traveled around the world to find particular individuals within particular societies and tribes ...by rigorously identifying where the oldest and longest-surviving male chromosomes are.
it turns out the the females hold the chromosomes responsible for any of our "mutations"..while in the males - we each carry the chromosomes that are "never changing" from the original humans.
so he posited that the individual males that live among societies have these "genetic markers" - and true enough - he found the "oldest" genetic markers in specific areas of the globe - where the males lived - and where their "unchanged" chromosomes remained for thousands of generations...usually in villages ...
for example: he posited that humans from africa somehow found a way to travel along the coasts of the continents - leaving of course their social "marks" as civilizations - but also leaving traces of their chromosomes.
in southern india was a family and a man that held a the oldest he could find in that area - the directly was related to males in australia...and from there - he found that these people also moved up north to where the "aryan" race in the caucasus and central asia are ...etc...
in central asia - he found a man , the patriarch of a nomadic family , speaking in modern russian of course, in kazakhstan - that had the chromosomes from which the later europeans came...but this man himself was a "younger" descendant of those that held the even older strain , such as those in india....
and he found that Central Asia was a kind of "nursery" of chromosomes from which later humans moved outwards - "back down to the middle east"..and the "youngest" - being the europeans...he found examples of people, with corresponding chromosome "ages" - where as they "moved" from East to west - older to younger - so did the "physical features" change....
thus - a central asian girl today may still have asiatic eyes, BUT has golden hair, and the eyes become rounder that farther "west" and "younger" the chromosome line went...
and from that - they also traced the other branch going deep into china, and then alaska, and then down into the americas and lastly into south america...
but in EACH of these - there was always a strain of the male chromosome that - could be traced originally to Africa...
and THEN -- he went back to the oldest possible strains he could find in africa - and lo - and behold.......
they are in a tribe called "mongo" - a nomadic, hunting/gathering tribe of highly expert skills that could read the footsteps of their prey even days late...and speaking a very old language - the only one known - that includes "clicks" - as if in imitation of insects and animals...
and get this:
photos of the tribes showed people of such DIVERSE possibilities :
some had curly hair, others straight hair, some had chineselike eyes, others very rounded and "western" eyes, others were very tall, others short, some had stouter build, others were slimmer, some had thick lip, others not so, others had certain pigments in their eyes other than black or brown, etc.......what really struck me is that - within this tribe - the oldest one on earth - was a collection of individuals that displayed ALL the possibilities and potential diversities that have spread throughout the world.
it was ALL there all along. and that , imo, was the PERFECTION of human beings - that began in Africa.
both our continuity and our diversity within it that unifies or should unify us all.
in other words, it seems that the originals, as the scientist said in AWE -
the original africans - or what we might call "humans" - "in the space of a mere few thousand years managed to populate the planet in all its extreme demands and climates and conditions with little more than their legs and brains, stamina and courage and curiousity....they TRULY were SUPERHUMAN beings".
that's where we ALL came from.
and as he said in the end:
"WE ARE ALL AFRICANS".
it made me cry.
That was such a great post, teddy. I am always interested in hearing about studies involving genetic markers, and I have long wished that some group would carry out some major study in India, particularly. My interest is also in linguistics and the distinct families of languages clearly point to different histories of origins, even though modern-day revisionists would like to mess things up due to their anxiety to make up history that would make them feel good. If you have the reference for the info you posted above, I'd like to have it. Even if you cannot find it right now, if you can post it as a reply to my post on some other article later on, I would greatly appreciate it :)
Hi Alcyon -- i saw this series on TV , i think it was PBS or some BBC show...or maybe National Geographic. but it seems that years AFTER i first saw it - is when it had become more popular. it was created by an American geneticist named Wells.
i think it has become available online as DVD.s
it is called "THE JOURNEY OF MAN".
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/12/1212_021213_journeyofman.html
http://www.google.com/search?q=the+journey+of+man&hl=en&client=opera&hs=lHs&rls=en&prmd=vb&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=xIR4TJb6C4Sdlgelv-zrCw&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CCQQqwQwAA
if you go to YOUTUBE - you can also type it in the search and it will give you a 13-part show.
but what is interesting is - even if other scientific traditions of study (such as anthropology) folks have certain criticisms about it - others have their own studies from those different disciplines that fairly support this approach - i emphasize : APPROACH -- which is going down to the genetic level.
the host of the show - a young man - said that , it's not his aim to challenge anthropologic or civilizational studies based findings but that he feels that even anthropologists can acknowledge that it the presence of humans in any given region is NOT necessarily evidenced by what they LEFT AS civilizations (buildings, pottery, utensils) since they may never have stayed long enough to establish such ...so -- what ELSE is left that humans kept carrying around to establish their presence - and THEREFORE is a trace of the history of human movement?
our own bodies and our own blood and genes. the history handed down WITHIN OURSELVES rather than what we CREATED as civilization.
Thanks, teddy. I find this area fascinating from a political point of view as well. I think there is a tendency among some people to put out or support theories that would make one group look better than the other or that would support a particular version of history. I notice this especially in India where some people are vehemently opposed to the idea that some of the northern Indians may have come from Central Asia, as they think it weakens a certain version of history.
That is why I was surprised when you mentioned this study: "in southern india was a family and a man that held a the oldest he could find in that area - the directly was related to males in australia...". I too have come across similar studies. Here's one that says this:
www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/47645/title/DNA_points_to_Indias__two-pronged_ancestry
"Members of each modern Indian group have inherited between 40 and 80 percent of their DNA from Ancestral North Indians and the rest from Ancestral South Indians" and
"In one exception to the pattern of genetic mixture in Indian groups, Onge hunter-gatherers living on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean display purely Ancestral South Indian ancestry, Reich and his colleagues say. Andaman Islanders possess direct genetic links to modern humans that left Africa around 70,000 years ago and eventually colonized what is now India, they suggest."
Anyway, thanks again for the reply.
But are we all human? Do you wonder if black folks reading this might just think that white folks will do anything to get out of recognizing their history in America but also in Africa herself? So now that we are in a "post racial" moment perhaps the original Africans dragged to these American (Turtle Island) shores in the most brutal conditions and kept in generational slavery the repercussions of which, judging from all indicators, are still reverberating today should just get over "it"? While I do not dispute that we may indeed ultimately be connected nevertheless the Africans who lost much of their melatonin really do need to tell the truth of their crimes against his very own brothers who kept their color. Truth precedes reconciliation. If we are going to leave a planet and a future for the unborn generations then we had best get busy healing these wounds.
I agree, vaialdiavolo. Finding commonality should not be used as an excuse for the whitewashing of past crimes, although I did not sense that was the intent on the posts above. But I do see posts from time to time that seek to blame all of humanity in general, as if all the peoples everywhere are equally culpable or that all societies are somehow capable of violence to the same degree.
>we ARE ALL AFRICANS
I know enough places those would be fighting words, becides were not one anything, except to true aliens, if you have a silicone based chemistry, then yes from their viewpoint were all alike.
A pitbull is not a cat is not a horse. but their all earthers, all carbon based kludge lifeforms.
>^^<