People are People

Before I came to Iraq, my experiences with foreign cultures and peoples was limited to what I'd experienced growing up in Los Angeles, and on a few short trips to Canada, Central America and the Carribean. I'd learned more from reading National Geographic than I had thru personal experiences. That has changed, at least a little, and hopefully for the better. I'm starting to understand that no matter where we live, what we believe, or what language we speak, we share more in common than we'd probably like to admit.

Granted, I've also had relatively limited exposure since arriving, but comparitively speaking I've learned lots about people in the last 6 months, and what I've learned has surprised me a little, altho I'm not sure just why.

In the past few months, I've been all over the Middle East (or "Southwest Asia" for the politically correct crowd) to places like Iraq (obviously), Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Turkiye (Correct spelling), Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Georgia. The one constant I've noticed is that as a whole, people are pretty much the same. While there are some major surface differences in things like religion, moral values, language, dress, etc, when you dig down deep, we're not really all that different. We all have the same wants, needs, desires and dreams. We all need to feel loved, we all need to have someone to love, we all need to feel accepted, we all need to have some sort of hope to cling to, and the list goes on. The differences lie in how we choose or are allowed to go about pursuing those needs, but the needs themselves do not change no matter how some may try to disguise them. We're the same.

In all my travels to all these places I'd never been before, I found it extremely easy to identify things like grocery stores, restaurants, schools, apartment buildings, etc etc. Aside from a different language on the signs (and sometimes not), they looked pretty much the same as back home. Going into a mall in Manama, Bahrain, or Dubai, UAE is almost exactly like going into a mall in any US city. Same stores, same layout, same smells, and people doing the same things. Watching children playing in Tbilisi, Georgia, if you couldn't hear the language they were speaking, you could have easily mistaken them for kids playing in Anytown, USA. So many similarities, and very few differences.

A few days ago, I watched as a father bought his 4 year old daughter her first "big girl" bicycle in a Dubai department store (that reminded me a great deal of the Sears in North Hollywood). I didn't need to know exactly what they were saying in order to understand what was being communicated. I could see the excitement in her eyes, and the pride and love in his. He saw me watching them. I flashed him a knowing smile, and he returned it. He knew that I knew we were the same.

I guess I am surprised that any of this surprises me. I don't really know what I expected, but I did expect to find vast differences in who and what people in different parts of the world were. I did not expect to find so many close similarities.

Watching the news at night, all I see is people complaining about differences. This group does things this way, and that offends that group. Hillary said this, but Obama did that. Who cares? Not that I've become some soft bellied tree hugger, but what about the similarities? Why are we so afraid of what is different that we are completely unable to focus on what we have in common and use that as a foundation on which to build? The more I look around, the more I see how we continue to divide ourselves based on differences, rather than come together based on similarities. I guess I'd have to study psychology for a fairly long time in order to even begin to understand the answers to those questions, but as an uneducated observer looking in from the outside, it seems pretty silly in most cases, don't you think?