You're Crazy: No, You're Crazy?

There is an old Quaker saying of a Quaker Husband to his wife, "Everyone in the world is crazy except thee and me and even thee are a little strange."

In the 1960s one of the priorities of my generation of baby boomers was to find a way to eliminate the possibility of a nuclear blast that would instantly incinerate and annihilate and end all life on earth.

What we came up with then is basically, "If you aren't trying to kill me, drug me, rape me, or poison me then likely you are okay and I don't have to think about killing you."

Which is a whole lot different than it was in the 1950s where you could go next door and ring the doorbell and if you weren't dressed right or didn't have the right skin color someone might pull a gun or a knife and kill you even here in the United States.

So, my generations contribution to the world was sort of to travel the world and meet all the people we could because generally people in the U.S. didn't do that before. There was a poster in the U.S. which was a parody of U.S. soldiers then which was:

"Travel all over the world to foreign lands and meet exotic people and kill them."

Obviously, this was facetious but it also was true in the 1950s and 1960s. This has also been true in the 2000s as well.

Basically, the problem is this: "If you haven't studied or lived with a foreign people how can you know what they are all about."

A young soldier 18 to 26 likely hasn't even gone to college and studied World History enough to know what the people they are visiting are all about. So, he or she just knows they are different and might be afraid of them. So, because of his or her lack of knowledge it is much easier to kill someone different than yourself, especially if you are from a very ethnocentric American small town in the middle of the U.S. with little or no contact with foreigner's.

Given enough time, however, that same soldier might fall in love with someone of that culture and even want to marry them and bring them home with them. So, learning about other cultures helps people not be so anxious to kill them or maim them or in the process get killed or maimed themselves.

Though our government tries to act in the best interests of the American people that doesn't always happen in reality.

So, one of my methods for not having to kill or be killed was not to join the military. Other people have different traditions than I do, however. So, I honor different traditions, especially those ones that allow my family to live in a free country and not one overrun with people from without trying to kill everyone. Besides, we already have enough people in this country with guns trying to kill people every day to begin with.

So, how does one get beyond dangerous ethnocentrism?

By taking to heart the addage,  "If you aren't trying to kill me, drug me, rape me, or poison me then likely you are okay and I don't have to think about killing you at least for now."

note:
Since these days all over the world men in addition to women are being raped everyday I left the statement the way it is.