There have been some interesting comments on my previous post on Arab Jews. I am by no means a scholar on Middle Eastern history and never meant to imply that. Having said that I think that my knowledge of the region, it’s people and culture surpasses that of most Americans. My post was not meant to be a definitive answer on the subject in any way. In fact it was a fairly simplistic response to a very complex question. I think it was generally accurate as far as it went, but it was definitely not comprehensive. Rather than continuing to pursue the original question, I want to attack it from a different direction.

Why do humans insist on categorizing and dividing everyone? When humans had to catch their food in order to survive and they were under constant threat of either starving or being eaten, it may have made sense to to divide the world in to things that were good to eat and things that you want to avoid. But in the 21st century, it is no longer necessary. We need to stop putting labels on everyone and dividing people into “US” and “THEM”. We are all humans. We all need to learn to live together and stop finding ways to divide ourselves. The reason the original question was so difficult to answer was because with 6.5 billion people on the planet, and endless variations of religions and cultures, you could divide the population into as many categories as there are people. But all this does is drive us all apart instead of pulling us together. In order for our species to survive beyond the next few decades, we need to work together to find solutions to our problems.

Instead of trying to define everyone with labels, we need to move beyond labels. We need to stop being black, white, muslim, jew, christian, hindu and countless other labels. We need to become just humans. We need to stop killing each other because we have different beliefs. Rather the day to day survival of each person as an individual, we face the threat of making this planet uninhabitable to all of us as a species. We potentially face our extinction. In light of some of the things that humans have done in the past, it might be debatable whether we even should survive. But if we are going to survive we need to refocus, and start thinking of ourselves as part of the human family. We are all individuals and we all have our unique personalities. This is a good thing. However, we also all have a lot in common. Let’s forget the labels. It doesn’t matter any more.