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A Quilt Of A Country And Finding Common Home
According to Kofi Annan, “we may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race.” Thinking about the quote and the readings from the collection, “Finding Common Ground” I have concluded that one obstacle that prevents people today from living together as one “human race,” is nothing. Nothing prevents us from living together as one human race, because we have been doing that since the beginning, we have been living together as humans; all we did was think differently about each other. Although, that is, if you take the quote literally. Figuratively, however, the problem is because we have different religions, and belong to different ethnicities-all we knew about each other was that we were somehow “different” from each other, rather than thinking that we were all equal, and part of the same race. It was in the way we thought, and judged, that was the problem.
This problem is still being fixed even now-the younger generations are getting along better with people from different backgrounds, but others are judging too easily, criticizing too much, easily believing rumors and stereotypes that, most of the time, are incredibly exaggerated. Now, according to Patel in his blog, “Making the Future Better, Together,” he states that Moses Sessius, leader of Hebrew Congregation of Newport in Rhode Island, asks in a letter, “whether Sessius and his people—Jews—would be safe in this new nation, or if they would be hounded and hated, blamed for crimes they did not commit” (paragraph 1). This example from Patel’s blog supports the fact that it is the way we think that is the problem, and to solve that problem, we need to change it, because people have been blamed for crimes they did not commit because of suspicion, or fear in the minds of others. However, I am not saying it is easy to change it or that we can, but I am saying that if we started by not blaming a majority because of a minority, and jumping to conclusions, then it could help with the problem. Another way to fix the problem is to think, that maybe, the “different” people might not lead so different lives from ours. This idea is inferred in “A Quilt of a Country,” by Quindlen, who writes, “ Leonel Castillo, former director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and himself the grandson of Mexican immigrants, once told the writer Studs Terkel proudly, ‘The old neighborhood Ma-Pa stores are still around. They are not Italian or Jewish or Eastern European any more. Ma and Pa are now Korean, Vietnamese, Iraqi, Jordanian, Latin American. They live in the store. They work seven days a week. Their kids are doing well in school. They’re making it. Sound familiar?’ (paragraph 7). These sentences in the text are saying that the other people, humans, lead almost same lives as us, and that they aren’t so “different.”
In order to think of each other as the same, so that we can truly live as one human race, we must be able to think that the other humans are like us, and that every man and woman was created equal. If we take this big step, then, we can think like how Kofi Annan once said. “We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race.”
