Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 13

I attended a lecture on Islam by Imam Yahya Hendi, Muslim chaplain at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. In his opening remarks he told how often people, when they first see him and hear his accent, inquire: “Where are you from?” He answers: “I am from dust. I am a dustian.” Such is his creative attempt to find common ground, to emphasize commonality, to begin with what unites us instead of what divides us, drawing on the words from Genesis: “You were made out of soil, and you will once again turn into soil.”4

The opposite of dustianism is tribalism, the assumption that one’s own tribe is superior to all others. Over forty years ago my wife and I visited London, Paris, and Rome with a tour group. There was a newly-married couple from Connecticut in our group. It soon became clear that their primary agenda was to snap pictures of each other in front of monuments and landmarks to prove to people back home that they had once actually been there. They organized each day around finding a place where they could get real food, which to them was American food—specifically, a cheeseburger, fries, and a carbonated drink. They had no interest in understanding, much less appreciating, what to them were vastly inferior cultures.

My high school classmates and I receive at least one e-mail a week from a former classmate whom I barely knew. She forwards articles that either tout her home state or promote noxious (to me) political views. She ends each preachment with multiple exclamation marks!!!!! Each e-mail exudes the attitude: “Pity the poor fool who doesn’t believe like me.”

Extreme tribalism burns Korans and launches terrorist attacks. The polar opposite of tribalism is a humbler “Come and talk it over”5 approach that is grounded in the reality that others, just like us, are dustians.