My email has turned into questions about how different we are. That’s a surprise to me. The geneticists, AKA scientists, tell us that our genome is almost identical. That makes sense because we all have the same basic structure. We have a head, two arms, and two legs. No matter what our race may be genetically, we can reproduce together. We are not like a cow and a giraffe trying to have a baby. In fact, we fit perfectly together for reproduction purposes. We vary in that we have different colored eyes, but we don’t think a person is different from us because they have brown eyes, and we have blue eyes. We all indeed have a preference for eye color – I’ve always been fascinated by green eyes.
Our emotions are the same. We all love. We all fear death and cry at funerals. So, where are the differences? They can be as subtle as a different-shaped eye or as apparent as different skin color. Turning back to the scientists, they tell us that a different colored skin protects us from the damaging effects and potential for skin cancer coming from the sun. I don’t see how we can turn something beneficial into something that marks someone as not equal. When I came back from Vietnam, I had several skin cancers. If I had been black, they likely would never have occurred.
I can understand how we get used to people looking a certain way and are surprised when people don’t look like that. In one of my earlier posts, I talked about how strange my wife looked when I came home because she had round eyes. All the women I had seen for the past year didn’t. I didn’t reject her because she didn’t fit the type of woman I was used to seeing. Our differences are so minor they shouldn’t allow us to degrade or look down on any other person.
Rather than rejecting a group of people, I have always been fascinated by differences. It can be as simple as the food a group of people like. In Asia, I saw insects for sale in the food markets. I couldn’t then nor now could I eat bugs intentionally. I can understand that insects are a good source of protein, and protein is one of the more difficult things to find. At the intellectual level, I can understand the use of insects as food. At a gut level, it makes me queasy. However, I don’t reject a group of people or what they eat. I eat and enjoy lutefisk, but some people are totally turned off by it and its smell.
I am amazed at how some people can turn slight differences between them and others into hate. We need to remember that we are more alike than different, even in fundamental areas such as our genetic code. We aren’t like the cow and giraffe. We can all have children together. There’s nothing more real than that act.
