From Mahe Island in the Seychelles I flew to the Maldives, a 3 hour hop in the tropical sun. I was drenched with sweat by the time I got to Gan Island in the Maldives. I had to get special permission to fly into Gan since I wasn’t a scheduled flight. I also had to make sure I could get aviation gas at the airport since their website only listed jet fuel. Turns out they did have avgas and the special permission was gladly granted for a fee. The world over, money talks.
Gan Island is part of a coral atoll. The runway was built by the British in WWII, later abandoned. The Maldives islanders got international financial help to build it into a large runway for tourism. The island is now an airport with hotels for visitors. The scuba diving is supposed to be especially good in the lagoon, with lots of semi tame colorful fish.
The island website says the best thing to do is nothing. That’s what I planned. I went over to the island hotel put up for the tourists at the airport and checked in. I went to my room, washed off the sweat, and went out to the lagoon. There is supposed to be a couple of old ships that were sunk in WWII that you can scuba to. Sounded like too much work. I swam in the lagoon, kind of like swimming in a salt bath rather than an Ocean.
Of course I couldn’t help but remember that most shark attacks worldwide occur in the Indian Ocean. For some reason, the sharks in the Indian Ocean like the taste of people better. My head was on a swivel as I snorkeled in the lagoon. I never did see a shark; probably a good thing or I would have had a heart attack.
Bored, or so I told myself, I went back to the hotel, got a drink and lounged around the pool. I watched the women, only a few, and relaxed, read, and fell asleep in the shade. I woke for dinner, went to my room, showered and changed for dinner.
While in the lobby headed for the restaurant, I logged on to check my e-mails. On the email page was a teaser about a football player who was injured lifting weights. I clicked on it and read about the guy who was seriously injured as in a crushed larynx, by a falling weight bar. He was in critical condition. At the bottom of the article was reader feedback. One fellow said he was glad since he hated that team. Immediately after were several people questioning the fellow on how he could be glad about any person’s misfortune.
Which made me think about a bigger question: what is it that makes people lose their humanity? I have been at a football game when a player was seriously injured. The entire stadium went silent. It didn’t matter to most that he was on the other team. I saw many offering up prayers. When he revived and was able to stand the fans gave him an ovation. That is humanity. That is how we expect people to act. But it isn’t always how a minority do act.
Why do some people lose that? What makes them ‘glad’ that an opposing player is injured? You see it in English soccer fans: hooliganism. Why do some people say that they would like to see the President shot? I don’t care which side you are on; it is just so wrong on so many levels to even be able to think that, let alone say it out loud. I can see how in war people lose their humanity. Surrounded by incredible violence and in danger of being killed at any moment, losing the veneer of civilization would be understandable.
When it becomes ‘us’ versus ‘them’, why do we stop seeing them as human and deserving of respect? And the us/them dichotomy appears to be a natural part of humans. We all form groups that exclude others. Sports, religion, politics, school cliques, and numerous other things we humans form groups that make us special for belonging and exclude ‘others.’ But why is it that sometimes that us-them split causes people to dehumanize the ‘them.’
The controversy in New York about building a Mosque is an example. We can't let 'them' have a place at 'our' shrine. But the whole point of America in inclusion of all Americans of whatever religion or background. We are supposed to be the opposite of us/them.
I watched some of the new cage fighting that is so popular. My first thought was just give one a trident and the other a sword and you’d have the same blood sport as existed with gladiators in the Coliseum.
I recently attended a play, Keely and Du, in which a group of pro-life zealots kidnap a rape victim to force her to carry the fetus to term. Neither side can see or even try to see the other’s viewpoint. The zealots cannot see that they have de-humanized the girl by kidnapping and locking her up. They are so certain of their rightness that they can no longer see. If you get a chance I recommend the play.
The horrible thing is, I don’t know the answer; I don’t even know if the question is answerable. Maybe it is inherent in humans. It is who we are. Researchers have found that chimpanzee bands wage war on each other. One band will move out single file, as quietly as they can into another group’s area. From their behavior, it is obvious that it isn’t a hunting party: they intend to do harm to ‘others.’ They will ambush a chimp from the other group and murderously attack the lone chimp. The researchers have found that the group will hold the ‘other’ chimp down while they take turns beating the helpless chimp. They’ll go so far as to pull off testicles and other body parts. It looks like an LA gang viciously attacking an opposing gang member. I can't tell the difference betwen one group of bloodthirsty apes and the other.
This dichotomy becomes even more glaring when it involves religion. Religious wars have often been the bloodiest wars. Since religion deals with things like, life, death, spirituality, and God, things about which we can never be certain, does that have any causal relation to the violence. There is no doubt that people search for certainty where there can never be any. That has to create a mental dissonance, ‘I want certainty, but I can’t have it.’ So the solution of some is to pretend a certainty that can’t actually be. But out there is those ‘others’ who by their existence as non-believers challenge the religious certainty. They, whoever they are, make me the believer doubt and I can’t have that, therefore, I must hate them to reassert my own certainty. Their ‘otherness’ makes them less human so I can treat them inhumanly.
We still are the hunter gatherers of ten thousand years ago in our genes. Civilization is a veneer that covers a violence that seems inherent inside all of us. How civilized are we really? There was no answer in Lord of the Flies which needed the Deus ex Machina of the naval officer to have a ‘good’ ending and like the book I don’t have a satisfactory answer either.
After dinner I went to the room and watched TV. They actually had a couple channels in English. Too bad they were BBC and stuffy Victorian soap operas or something. I fell asleep early. So much for the exciting Maldives… yawn.
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Copyright Rod O'Steele © 2009, 2011