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By Mike Cuenca | October 26, 2001
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Your Oct. 24 editorial, equating multiculturalism and evil, reflects an
abhorrent lack of awareness of human history and ignorance of what evil
is and what culture is. And you have it exactly backwards. If humans
could learn to accept the cultural differences in the people around us,
it would help stop the evil that your attitude has produced.
What you call "multiculturalism" is a relatively new concept and it is
a response to the cultural facism that has long produced a lot of evil.
Throughout recorded human history, idiots who believed that there was
just one culture even within their own societies drove their societies
to war against people whose cultures they deemed unacceptable. The
Middle East, birthplace of Judaism and its spiritual spinoffs
Christianity and Islam, is a good example of a place where generation
after generation of unenlightened xenophobes have allowed their fears
of others to lead them to take life and oppress others, leading to such
proud human endeavors as the Inquisition, the continuing conquest of
the Native Americans, slavery, the Nazi war on the world, and the Sept.
11 bombings — all equally evil.
Look inside yourself. Can you
define yourself by one single culture? I bet you share cultural
practices and beliefs with a great many people. You may like American
TV sitcoms. You might like Native American art. You might like to wear
sports team paraphernalia. You probably go to a church. You might like
Barry Manilow. Each of these practices reflects a cultural choice. Each
of us makes a multitude of cultural choices each and every day of our
lives. No matter how many of your own cultural choices you share with
the "mainstream" of a society, no other human being on Earth is exactly
like you. The mixture — call it multiculturalism — in each of us
defines our personality. You must ask yourself why you accept the
differences in some of the people around you, but not in others.
This nation is comprised of people from around the world. Each of those
people has made valid cultural choices about how to live. By teaching
our children — and obviously some of our adults — to respect those
choices and to accept the unavoidable reality of human individuality,
we could finally stop a lot of the evil. We've tried it your way and
it's led to at least two millennia of evil.
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Originally published by the Lawrence Journal-World.
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