SIX DEGREES AWAY FROM A MORE GLOBAL UNDERSTANDING

September 17, 2012

“The world has changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost...”

It feels a bit like that doesn’t it? Thirty years after the massacre of Sabra and Shatila, the world feels even darker than it was then. True we’ve witnessed some amazing political developments, like the fall of the iron curtain in the former USSR and the end of Apartheid in South Africa; and we have made spectacular technological leaps, such as the spread of the Internet and the sequencing of the human genome... And yet we are living in a pressure cooker.

We need to readjust, but we are probably still too immature as a species to do it without a socio-political earthquake. I expect that part of the problem is the chasm between haves and have nots. In some ways it's better to have little, than just that much more to know what is missing. So many people are dissatisfied. Then you have governments who can see that they have lived way beyond their means, or are in a position where the bottom of the barrel is in sight. Still, there's nothing that a bit of oil can't cure, so they start squabbling intensely about long forgotten territorial claims.

Tragically, the uncertainty makes us even more partisan. Only today a colleague of mine complained about the riots sparked by that anti-Islamic film. "Christians would not behave like that!" It's a bit uncanny to have to think about how Christians can or cannot behave, on the anniversary of the slaughter at Sabra and Shatila. The Israeli Army had penned Palestinian refugees in their camp, near Beirut, during the Lebanese civil war, while allowing the Christian Phalangist militia in to butcher them with knives and machetes. The exact count is uncertain, but between 762 and 3,500 men, women and children were butchered between September 16 and September 18, 1982.

We have to start somewhere, so let's start with ourselves. If it's true that there are six degrees of separation between ourselves and anyone else in the world, then let's get cracking and work towards a greater understanding of each other and the solutions we need for the challenges we face.