Thanks for the fine comments (and the comments from your shrink-wrapped friend on Ritalin). A very few comments: At 8:16 AM 7/8/96, Arun Mehta wrote:
because you were taught hate, doesn't mean you won't outgrow it. My mother was active in the freedom struggle against the British, and told me enough horror stories that I grew up hating them. But once I met some perfectly decent specimens, it evaporated.
This is my experience, too, with using common sense in deciding which races, if any, to hate.
India is a large, diverse country with lots of injustice, poverty and other problems. When we analyze what breeds terrorism, we find aspects such as:
- Severe neglect by the government (i.e. problems keep getting worse): For instance, the north east (which is east of Bangladesh, and has a long history of militant opposition) had to agitate for a long time to even get a railway line to connect them to the rest of the country.
A case, of course, where the government set the policy on who to connect, based on votes and influence. In a market economy, regions get connected by rail when a market for goods to be shipped appears likely, when customers will pay for tickets, etc. (Until the last several decades, this is the way railroads and shipping in the U.S. expanded. J.J. Hill built the "Great Northern" rail line across the northern part of the U.S. without a dime of subsidy and without much interference by government.)
- Meddling by politicians: in Punjab, there was a Sikh regional party that was quite strong. To erode its popular base, Indira Gandhi encouraged the fundamentalists on its right. Similarly, Rajiv Gandhi's government helped train the Tamil LTTE. Both paid for these blunders with their lives, at the hands of the very groups they had once tried to foster.
This "tactical move" of pitting one religious or ethnic group against another should be a lesson for the rest of us. Much better to take a hands-off attitude and essentially pretend that differences don't matter. (As opposed, say, to giving special privileges to Baptists, blacks, Catholics, etc.) In this regard, I think the U.S. got it "right" (though we are drifting toward a "minority rights" situation, which is sowing the seeds of Indian-style sectarian conflict, e.g., the riots in Los Angeles a few years ago). (Arun is now quoting someone else)
The U.S. has a level of tolerance for diversity that I only recently came to appreciate. We hosted a foreign exchange student from Scotland (hardly culture shock to him), but he surprised me when he commented on how surprised he was that different groups of people were mixed together
I've had a similar experience. I was part of the Indian delegation to a couple of Amnesty International International Council meetings. In this organisation, multiracialism and multiculturalism are heavily promoted. But if you looked at delegations from Europe, even from countries with sizable racial minorities, they were typically all-white. The US delegation, on the other hand, had blacks, different kinds of Asians, Hispanics... and not by design -- the US section leadership is highly "mixed", so they did not have to think about multiracialism, it just happened. Of course, given the "melting pot" ethos in the US, this is hardly surprising.
Indeed, Americans are often branded as racist yahoos by the enlightened, racially-tolerant folks of Europe. They cluck at our "racial problems." However, America is a melting pot, as Arun notes. On a daily basis we interact with blacks, Asians, Mexicans, whites of all flavors, etc. Blacks, for example, are very well-represented in so many areas (not science and technology, for educational/cultural/image reasons--see Note if you want to hear why). For anyone who buys the UNESCO line about how American is a fundamentally racist society, a visit for a few weeks should clarify things. There is still a lot of racial separation, by choice and not by law, and economic disparities. But the fact is that the races mix on a daily basis, with little or no conflict. Music, sports, entertainment, business, etc. (Note: For various cultural and image reasons, science and technology are _not_ emphasized as careers for black children. Contrast the image of science in predominantly black environments with the image of science in, say, predominantly Jewish environments. The result is clear: blacks are severely underrepresented in these areas, and Jews are overrepresented in these same areas. Hey, I'm just citing a basic truth of our times, at least in this country. Similar statistics apply to Asians, with more than half of all U.C. Berkeley science and engineering undergrad students being Asian, and something less than 3% of them being black. The figures for who _graduates_ are even more skewed. There are various reasons for this. One of my pet peeves is how the terms "dweeb," "nerd," and "geek" are used to characterize science and engineering majors and professionals. Hardly terms that are likely to make a brother in the hood consider studying science!) --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."