Us vs Them

Good guys against the bad guys. Family against outsiders. North against the South. England against the colonies.  It seems as if there’s always something going on that would have “us” standing together against someone else. It amazes me sometimes that we are able to define ourselves so narrowly that we can differentiate ourselves from others.

Look at our friends over in Europe who somehow always seem to find something that separates them and they can fight over. France, which when considering Western Europe is the biggest country, is only about twice the size of Colorado. Great Britain, with whom we have fought two wars, is smaller than Oregon. Germany is smaller than Montana, and Japan is smaller than California. [Side Note #1: Yes I know that Japan isn’t in Europe, but I had jumped into countries we had fought wars with.]

In one count there are some 45 countries included in Europe, while the one country of the United States is just about the same size. It’s debatable how many actual languages are spoken in Europe, there could be more than 45. Here in the USA we all speak the same language. [Side Note #2: OK I’ll admit that if you go up to Maine with someone from southern Georgia they might not actually be able to understand what the other was saying, but if you show them each the same sentence in English they will be able to understand what’s on the paper.]

Just how different are we? All of us who live in Europe, the USA, and pretty much everywhere on the planet look alike. You know one head, two legs and two arms. Skin color is a pretty poor way to tell us apart since we all have only small variations in epidermal coloration. Language might work except that a significant part of the earth’s population speak more than one language. Height, weight, and general body mass also are weak identification markers. Just step outside your own house and look around the average neighborhood in the USA. We truly do come in all shapes, colors, and sizes. So who are the “Us’s” and who are the “them.”

We seem to be able to manufacture significant differences whenever we want to establish separation from others. In wars the boundaries of our nations are good enough to say that those outside those boundaries are different. Why do you think that we established uniforms in the first place? Why to tell us from them. How else would the Germans have been able to tell themselves from the Poles that they had just conquered? In our own civil war we literally had brother fighting brother. Not much chance to tell who the enemy was during that one without the difference in clothing. You remember the “blue” and the “gray” don’t you?

I was reminded of our ability to determine that “we” are different from “them” last night during the “Presidential Debate.” [For our non-American readers last night we were able to watch the two men who want to lead our country for the next four years talk to TV cameras, about what they think about certain things and each other’s beliefs. We call it a debate even though they often talked about two entirely different things and rarely answered each other assertions.  If you were unable to watch the televised version of the affair and had to read what was being said over some sort of texted radio version you would have had trouble telling one speaker from the other. Their policies were so similar that they were often impossible to tell apart.]

The interesting thing is that between the members of the two parties putting forward candidates for the election, they have spent literally millions of dollars trying to show those of us who will vote in a few days how each differs from the other. To elect the other party’s candidate, we are told, will result in catastrophic demise of the nation, failure of the world’s economy, and less candy for the children next Halloween.   

Hopefully the day after the election, we who live here will all forget how we have been told not to listen to “them” and instead try to go forward with the rest of “us.”

TEASER

He was just finishing up grading the freshman English quiz that he had given to the four classes  he taught at the university.  He was pleased that a number of them had aced the quiz and gotten every question correct.  That either meant that he was reaching them and getting them to review that material he told them was important, or else he was making the quizzes too easy.  He preferred to believe that he was reaching them.  He was after all the same age as most of them, eighteen, although he would technically be nineteen in another month.  He laughed to himself at that thought, and since it was an English literature class he was teaching he asked “To be eighteen or twenty-three, that is the question?”

No, there was no question that he had been born almost nineteen years ago.  Both his mother and father had repeatedly answered the question of how old their son was.  They knew when his birthday was and they had the birth certificate to prove it.  It was true they would tell you that he looked older than his age but that was just the way he looked.  It was also true that he was one of the brightest students at the university and that was one of the reasons he had been given a teaching assistant’s job as soon as he had finished his bachelor’s degree.

He finished entering the quiz scores on his laptop computer and followed through with the transfer of the records to the university’s mainframe. He was nothing if not meticulous. It was as he was powering down his computer that he heard it.  At first he couldn’t place the sound but somewhere in the back of his mind he knew what it was and it made the hairs on the back of his sandy blond head rise.

He stepped out of the classroom to better hear the sound.  He looked around to see if anyone else heard it, but then realized that he was probably the only one left in the building at this late hour.  There it came again.  It started out fairly low but then rose in pitch until he was fairly sure that only the dogs in the neighborhood could hear it.  He went in the direction he thought the sound was coming from.  As he was running down the hallway the sound came again and this time he had to admit that it was the sound of someone screaming.  He got to the end of the hallway and stopped at the stairs to decide if the sound was coming from the floor above or below.

It was coming from the floors above him and now he was sure that it was a woman’s voice, screaming.  A woman who was terrified.  He ran up one flight of stairs and was certain that it was coming from that floor.  He began to run down the hall in the direction the screaming was coming from. When she screamed again, he could tell that it was coming from the wing of the building that housed the science labs. As he turned down that corridor that he could see the smoke and it only took several steps before he could feel the heat.

He grabbed the fire alarm as he went past it and pulled down on the red handle to call the fire department.  He charged down to where the flames were now reaching out into the hall way.  There were three labs at the end of that hall way.  The one on the right was the one on fire.  There in a wall nitch was a fire extinguisher.  He opened the door that covered the extinguisher and grabbed it.  It was lighter than he thought it should be and as soon as he looked at the dial on the top he knew why.  The dial was fully into the red zone, which meant the thing was empty.

He threw it down and looked for another but there weren’t any in sight, nor was there a fire hose in the hall way. Short of cupping his hands and getting some water from the water fountain that was several feet away he didn’t have any means of fighting the fire.

The woman screamed again and now he could tell that she was in a full panic mode.  That, he guessed, meant that she didn’t have any means of fighting the fire either. There was a lot of smoke coming out of the room but he could see the screaming woman flattened against the far wall.  There was a long laboratory counter between him and the woman, and flames were reaching out from the counter toward her. The way the fire was growing there were only a few minutes left before she would be engulfed by the flames. She was trapped with no way out and with all the smoke she probably couldn’t even tell that he was out there trying to help. His mind was racing through possible things he could do to help, but everything was coming up ashes, just as the woman would be if he stood there frozen.

The fire alarm was ringing but he knew that help would come too late for the woman in the lab.  That only left him with one thing to do that could save her.  

If you want to find out what he does, you’ll have to follow the icon to the right to get “Time Out.”

The Greatest Sin

What is the greatest sin? No I’m not going to pretend to know the answer to theological questions that have befuddled religious leaders for millennia. I don’t know if failing to donate a large enough amount constitutes a sin, or if not adopting the correct posture while talking to your god is a flagrant misdeed that will cause you to loose points. Here I propose to write about the sins of writers.

Now there are those who would say that a writer should pray or beseech Calliope the muse of poetry or writing, to learn what to write. Others might say that writers should pray to Saint Francis de Sales for guidance. I won’t dismiss such efforts. Anyone who has picked up pencil or pen and attempted to put their thoughts down on paper, or whatever else you might have to scribble on, knows that you need all the help you can get in the process.

What then would be a sin for those who would write their stories? I’ve read many scholarly articles that say a writer who abuses the rules of grammar, has no right to be called an author. Others say that a writer who misspells words in his, or her, attempt to place their stories before the reader has brought shame down upon their heads. I personally have always had a problem with spelling. I don’t suffer from dyslexia, I just happen to fall into that group of folks who have difficulty spelling a word. As for following the rules of grammar, I have had a running battle with commas for years now. Should there be one before a quote with in a sentence? Is there one needed before the last place in a listing? Personally I like to put them wherever I feel the need for a pause.

All of the above has probably given you the ability to guess that I don’t view infractions of grammar or spelling as sins. Well at least not major sins. Were I speaking from a catholic position I might refer to them as “venial” sins and not “mortal” sins. I don’t think that errors such as those could cause a writer to lose his life as a writer and doom him to a life of doodling and writing awful puns.

I think that a writer’s greatest sin is not to write. By that I mean to give up writing, not just to miss a day in their daily journal. [Is there such a thing as the “occasional” journal?] I know of folks who believe that if you intend to be called a writer you must write something every day. I also have met persons who speak of suffering from a “writer’s block” that stops them from putting words down on paper.

I don’t think that if you miss a day or so in developing your story, your hands will turn to stone and you will never be able to write again. I do believe that if you have a story inside of you waiting to come out, you have a duty to that story to bring it out to the light of day and the eyes of your readers.

I have gone for days without getting back to a story I was writing. The computer mocks me as I check the daily stock reports. The words on the news stories start to blur, and I have trouble reading even the simplest story about a lost puppy. If I pick up a pencil to do a Sudoku I find my hand scratching out the name of a character in the margin when I’m not looking. Eventually I give up and go back to the story, lest I live in “sin.”