Monday 26 December 2011

26. Celebrate the differences

There's this funny quote that goes "You're unique just like everybody else" I'm not here to debate the oxymoron but to appreciate that everybody is different. You'll never find another you and how boring it would be if we were all the same. Variety truly is the spice of life and meeting people from different backgrounds and who've had a different life experience is always an interesting experience.

One thing I've come to see about us human beings is that we will always find a way to divide ourselves be it based on religion, race, social standing, ethnicity, football club etc. What''s even more sad is when we use this differences as a basis for conflict e.g religious differences in Northern Ireland, the numerous tribal conflicts in Africa. What's worse is that even some of the same ethnicity decide to fight each other based on clan differences like in Somalia. Makes you ask the question can't we all just get along? Can we ever embrace unity in diversity and understand our differences are not a reason to fight but to stick together?

Something else closely related to this is that as humans we often fear what we don't understand. This is played out a lot in the social sphere where we fear new people who we don't understand, sometimes even concocting stories about them. For example some tribes are said to be cannibals and such kind of things and in some communities in the US people fearing blacks ans Hispanics because of crime. WE even go to the extent of spreading so called FUD- fear uncertainty and doubt about the unknown, pretty common in the computer world for instance Microsoft telling people stories about Linux when it was knew. We needn't fear but rather take time to understand that which is new.

I'm learning that as I go along in life I will encountered many who I differ with and have to learn to get along. After all what is war good for? absolutely nothing. This is very relevant in Kenya where we are trying to build ethnic cohesion, let's laugh at each others quirks and get along not use it as a cause for conflict as we did in the last elections

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