RE: Amazing Katrina-related essay

From: Elena Dent <debadger_at_pacbell.net_at_hypermail.org>
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 21:02:49 -0700

Not a bad article. I agree the Tribe we should belong to is the one
consciously chosen not the one we happen to be born to. It's nice to look
at your birth Tribe and see enough in it worth defending. I am neither
sheep nor shepherd; I am a human. I hope a civilized one. We all have 'us'
and 'them'. We're social animals, it is hardwired that we will do this.
HOW we treat 'them' is a measure of how civilized we are.

I have no truck with warriors, who are a lovely romantic image, but as our
soldiers in Afghanistan quickly noted they are notoriously bad at the work
of a soldier. They're quick with a gun or knife, insanely courageous if
they think they will win (even against long odds), but very slow to do the
boring things like night watch in the rain, very very slow to learn how to
maintain a generator and absolutely unwilling to do something tiresome like
build a wall or dig a communal latrine. All of which a good soldier does
because that is part of his job and he knows it. A warrior goes off to play
battle, serene in the knowledge that some {pink} aid agency or three will
take care of the wives and kids and him too if he gets hurt. He'll come
back at his leisure, when the fun is worn thin, to pick up the wives and
kids and raise another generation of the same. And no one {pink} questions
the logic of this. If someone {grey} suggests perhaps we should try
something different, teach people how to live in towns, work with other
tribes, find common ground they are immediately castigated as 'racist scum
forcing their values on another culture'.

Come to think of it, when some {greys} suggested that Accountability and a
few other things would be the price of wiping out their national debts...
most African leaders howled outrage at the Very Idea of someone offering aid
with strings attached! So they'd rather live under the yoke of a crushing
national debt than have it wiped clean by accepting the notion that they are
accountable for that aid. Probably because THEY are quite well off, thank
you very much and the fact that they are destroying their country matters
not at all to them.

Elena

A grey sheep - of the type who will scatter and then stomp any sheepdog
foolish enough to try to herd them but who accept their Livestock Guard Dog
as one of the family.
Received on 2005-09-06 21:02:38