Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Why Can't We Be Friends?

Want to improve race relations but don't know where to start?



Here are some of the many things you can do to help reduce racism in your personal life and in your community.

And a tune I chose to accompany the post. Simple question. Simple lyrics. "Why Can't We Be Friends?"...



The band (War) got the idea for this song when they were traveling in Japan in the early '70s. Drummer Harold Brown said, "We're all connected by language, and by our food, and by our culture. Most racists don't know why they're racist. But you pick them up and take them over and drop them in a country, like India or Pakistan, guess what? 'Why can't we be friends?' Because all of a sudden you find out we're more alike inside than we are on the outside. We started realizing that that's really important. You travel all over the world, you can't speak a lot of their language. But one thing they do know, they know your body language, how you may react."

12 comments:

  1. That was a great song Mistress. I have always tried to spread goodwill, and I'm trying to build good international relations one at a time.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looks like Tokyo Rose is doing her part.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The problem is not necessarily race but class. Education is the equalizer. You rise in class the more you are educated. The few supremacists that showed up in VA. were uneducated rednecks and nut-jobs.

    Although I find Confederate monuments troublesome I also have a distaste for revisionist history. If you don't learn it, you're doomed to repeat it.

    Hate to see beautiful marble and bronze statuary destroyed but understand that it glorifies an ugly past. That goes for the Union statues as well!

    Perhaps the statues could be melted down and repurposed into monuments that represent the Civil War entirely rather than one side or the other. A reminder that this happened once and should not happen again.

    Learn from History.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I also think class is a big problem.... social inequality, lack of education.... it feeds other predudices.
    Anyhow, I'm a friendly soul.... unless someone is cruel to my dog.
    Sx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In complete agreement about the class system. In America being white and male should afford me the highest level in the class system however, being gay means that I'm in a lower caste with the strippers, murderers and junkies.

      I still feel that education is the key to rising above the system.

      Until we reach a Star Trek utopia of a New World Economy, I'm afraid we are all second class citizens unless you win the lottery or invent something.

      Delete
  5. *prejudices
    Good grief, I blame my lack of education.
    Sx

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hatred is something that is taught, not what we're born with.

    ReplyDelete
  7. By now, you Bitches have all seen Obama’s tweet?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. He should just come back and run another term. His tweet was a bright spot in this dark period for us few sane Americans.

      Delete
  8. The idiots that support him better start singing another song, like yesterday.

    ReplyDelete
  9. When we moved into the city where I grew up, I came in a no good area, and my friends were kids from no-German families / backgrounds. "Race" is no category - at least I try. The colour of skin, the religion, the sexual orientation - it is either human or cultural - as long as I am regarded as equal human being, I assume this from the person I face. I try to meet any person friendly and in an open way. Usually I do not get kicked in the groin.

    I do have prejudices against people with a certain background, a certain "coming from". They have the same colour of skin like me, but grew up in another part of Europe. And chances are good that I am confronted with ideas, and a way of thinking, I find very hard to accept, lest to understand.

    Being friends - means trust, means being allowed to be one self. I do not trust people who think they are "better" or "God's gift" because they have a certain colour, hate other people who do not fall into their categories. I can not accept this.
    It is not "us" (who ?) against "them" (who ?). These are people I do not want to be friends with.
    Tolerance comes to an end, towards those people who can not tolerate others being themselves, being "the other".
    The summary, the crowning of this kind of thinking, is, when people march (what a stupid way of movement !) behind a flag with a swastika. It does not get better than this, there you have it all condensed.
    I am no friend of over-simplifications, but in this case it is right : Who walks behind such a flag says "Yes" to Auschwitz.
    And puts himself out of any civilised discours.

    I agree with M8ty, education is a key. But it is no "equalizer". The curriculum here includes the history of the "Third Reich", but many do not understand what it really means. It is imho about values, what I am talking about is cast-iron humanism - but when the social reality shows you that you belong to a marginalised group, that you have no "real" chance of "making it better", all this efforts are in vain. And the simple explanations win.
    Look at those who really do make assaults - they are usually young males with an empty head - and some swine fill these heads with ideas of glory. The mechanism is nauseatingly the same, from the "Werwolf" of 1945 to idiots in Spain 2017.
    At the moment I am ready to give in, dumbness is invincible - and I'm with Mitzi, "in a caring way".

    Just a coincidence, 25 years since the pogrom in Rostock.
    What I read from Mr Grisham did not kick me out of my shoes, but today the man is right. He said somewhere that da Leader enabled the fascists - and THIS is something to really worry about.

    Sorry for the long bla.

    ReplyDelete