Different but the Same

It’s a strange feeling being back in Cape Town. I am actually in the same bedroom I was earlier this year when I was over here for a couple of weeks so everything is very familiar.

A friend told me recently that overseas travel confronts you with two facts:

1) a lot of the things you expect to be different aren’t.. People are basically the same the world over.

2) a lot of the little things that you expect to be the same are actually different, so you are continually being surprised at what isn’t normal.

I have found those things to be very true.

I also wonder if they may be true at home but just less obvious.

It is easy to fall into the trap of separating people in your mind into us and them.. And its easy to pretend that they are so different it is not possible to understand them.. To attribute different basic motivations to them than you would to you.

I am still processing a trip I made a few weeks ago to Auschwitz. I think I will be processing that trip for a long time to come. Auschwitz is what happens when you take the us and them kind of thinking to it’s logical conclusion.

I think one of the best lyrics ever written in a song was penned by Sting in the mid 1980s.

Russians

In Europe and America, there’s a growing feeling of hysteria
Conditioned to respond to all the threats
In the rhetorical speeches of the Soviets
Mr. Krushchev said we will bury you
I don’t subscribe to this point of view
It would be such an ignorant thing to do
If the Russians love their children too

How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy
There is no monopoly in common sense
On either side of the political fence
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too

There is no historical precedent
To put the words in the mouth of the President
There’s no such thing as a winnable war
It’s a lie that we don’t believe anymore
Mr. Reagan says we will protect you
I don’t subscribe to this point of view
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too

We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
What might save us, me, and you
Is that the Russians love their children too

I think part of the reason the lyrics of that song keep coming back to me is the truth that no matter where people are in the world, their basic concerns are true everywhere. In an African village, on an Indonesian rubbish dump, in a former communist bloc country or in outback Australia, people are people. They love their children, they worry about work, they have hopes and dreams. Sting saw the antidote to the cold war as the realization of that commonness.

When it all boils down we are the same, and anyone who wants to say different to that is dangerous.

There is a flip side to that statement though. We are all the same but we are also all different, profoundly different.

The times my marriage has it’s most difficult moments are when I think I know my wife. Instead of listening and trying to understand, I relate to the Leeanne that is in my head. The truth is that Leeanne is so different to me that I will never fully understand her.

Relationships find difficulty when we expect people to think and be like us.

The normal thing is, when someone does or says something, for us to assume they are feeling and thinking what we would be thinking and feeling if we acted the same way. The problem is that this is rarely true.

Going overseas brings these two truths sharply into focus, however my sense is that they are truths we need to keep coming back to when the difference are not so marked.