A life's lesson revisited

Did they really need to spend millions of dollars sequencing the human genome to find out that humans are 99.9% identical to each other? Well, in actuality it's more than 99.9% but that's not my point.

It was Class Day today, and the kids were fortunate in being able to get former president Bill Clinton as their speaker. He talked about a few things, but his main message (as far as I was willing to listen through my prejudices) was that humans are 99.9% alike, but we choose to focus on that 1/10th of one percent. In our need to feel special, we focus on what makes us unique and forget the bigger picture: that we are more alike than not. That last line was a personal thought by the way.

I've always had this One theory about the world. I first articulated it when I was 18, and I've not really thought about it since. That was the era before the human genome was sequenced, and I had no way of proving that humans were really all the same. It just seemed obvious -- the same emotions, the same life events, the empathy (even though we choose to ignore that because we cling on to the notion that we are unique). I'd just had my first taste of the world, and what I saw was that everyone was given a different situation in life, but we were basically the same people.

It is the same with time -- it flows through and connects us all. It's hard to remember that when you're on a little island with almost no sense of history. But even in a modern and fleeting place like New York City, it's not hard to remember and imagine how things all began. We are all one, connected through our common experiences as humans regardless of the era in which we live.

Clinton told a parable about a farmer's axe. A farmer had a favorite axe, even though he's replaced the blade three times, and the handle twice. I see the world in the same way, and I hope that the next time I meet someone new that I cannot take a liking to, I will try my best knowing that we are pretty alike.

To my little sister who is about to embark on the first of the biggest of journeys in her life, I have a message. I want her to know that the native person whose land your foreign feet will tread upon is not very different from any other person. Look for what you have in common and learn to relate to any man on Earth because he is your brother. Keep in mind though that family is still capable of harming each other.