Column: Love is universal
As a little white kid growing up in what was a small predominantly white town in Southwestern Pennsylvania in the 50s and 60s, I was exposed to some racial slurs, but those slurs were more often directed toward my partial Italian ethnicity than someone else’s skin color or religious belief. Someone once explained to me that if you worked side-by-side in a coal mine, African American and Caucasian, you had better not be a bigot because your life depended on a shared relationship. Otherwise, you might find yourself alone in what might otherwise have been a pre-warned roof collapse.
As a student teacher, however, I was exposed to a different scenario in a city where the predominant means of blue-collar employment at the time was in the steel mills. Maybe because it was not a life and death roof-collapsing scenario in the mills and the workforce was distributed more like a caste system, or maybe it was because the area was even more ethnically diverse with people from at least 20 different countries working in those mills, but the prejudice, bigotry, hatred, and desire for ethnic cleansing was stronger than anything I’d experienced up until then.
A psychologist who specialized internationally in conflict resolution explained to me that, in a caste system, the tendency was for the racial and ethnic discrimination to be most strongly directed to the last group in, or what is in their mind, the lowest level. Maybe the Italians didn’t like the Irish, the Russians didn’t care for the Ukrainians (but that’s a longer story), the Polish vs. the Hungarians or vice versa. In fact, in the little patch towns there were pockets of ethnicity where each nationality had its own church, its part of town and the desire to preserve its cultural heritage.
The bottom line, however, was the negative talk, the racism, the hatred was most often a way for the offenders to “fill their tanks with cheap gas.” In other words, by putting someone else down, the offenders felt just a little bit better about themselves, about their place in life, their position or lack of status. He referred to this phenomenon as “filling their tank with cheap gas.” It’s the easiest and quickest approach they can find to pump themselves up emotionally.
What’s been happening lately is truly a much more pernicious, dark, sinister approach to ethnic cleansing that is being constantly fed and stoked by both some mass media outlets and politicians.
Having been in Bosnia immediately after the war, I saw firsthand how out of control this type of thinking can become. The ethnic hatred toward the Croatians, Serbians and Muslims fed by those in charge was sadistic.
Because they were considered to not be of the right nationality, the right tribe, soldiers would walk into pediatric wards of hospitals and murder children in their beds. Fathers would be forced to fight their sons until one of them was killed, or they would both be killed. These fights were held in front of the other family members.
In the United States, with at least two or three television networks and members of political parties pushing some form of anti-immigrant, anti-African American, anti-Semite, and anti-Asian rhetoric, mass murders are becoming the source of pride for mostly demented white men.
Regardless of your personal belief, biologically there is only one race, the human race, and like it or not, we are all part of it. Not unlike that fact that whether it’s chocolate, black, white, or golden retriever, they are all retrievers, we are all human beings. We all bleed red blood, and we all want a better world for our families.
Stop the replacement theory rhetoric. It is absolutely insane. This country was built by all races, religions, creeds and nationalities. Intelligence is not limited to any single race or religion. Creativity exists universally. Most of all love is universal, and that’s all we really need.
This article originally appeared on The Daily American: Nick Jacobs column about racisim
