We ARE All One!

The Hindus bathe in the Ganges. The Jews go to the mikveh. The Catholics dip their hand in holy water and make the sign of the cross. The Christians, both Protestant and Catholic baptise. The Native Americans go to the sweat lodge. The Turks go to the hamam. The Russians go to their bath house. We all understand, on some level, the sacred power of water. We all find some connection to the devine in it. Even the surfer paddling out to the waves can understand. It is in all of us.

No matter what part of the world you may come from, your ancient ancestors rowed canoes, shot arrows from bows, threw spears, played drums, and shook rattles. It is the heritage of all of us.

Scientists now tell us that modern humans first appeared in Central East Africa around two hundred thousand years ago or so.

In almost every civilization there is a story of a perfect garden paradise in the far off prehistoric past. It's in the Bible. It's in the legends of ancient Rome. It's in the Epoch of Gilgamesh. It's in the Ramayana. It's in hundreds of Native American creation stories. It's in the legends of the Aboriginal tribes of Ausralia. It's in the folk lore of African tribes. It is as though all humanity, deep in our cultural memory, remember a time when we lived in the same village, in the same forest, speaking the same language, having the same faith somewhere deep in Africa, in the earliest dawning of our history.

Some geneticists say that races do not exist. They say that in some parts of the world red hair was considered, for millennia, to be more beautiful by the local culture, in others black hair, in some dark skin, in others light skin. Whatever was considered culturally beautiful was more likely to find a mate, and therefore more likely to reproduce, creating the illusion of races. A black race and a white race are no more real than a race of green eyed people, or a race of blue eyed people, or a race of tall people, or a race of short people. There is only the Human race.

We have been tought to devide ourselves with emaginary lines drawn across the land. We call them national borders. But they exist only in the mind. We fight wars to defend these lines, but they aren't even really there. They're make-believe.

In every nation on earth, the people heavily outnumber the government that rules them. Yet so many of us fear the powers that be. So many of us believe the lie that they tell us. That our militaries are there to protect us from those foreign people over there, because they are our enemies. But it isn't true. Their laws, weather legal or religious, have only the power that we give them with our obedience to them. Alexander Hamilton once said that the constitution is only a piece of paper, and that the only way to make it real is to convince the people to believe in it and to bind themselves to it. And that's the way it is with all laws, all governments, and all nationalities. It's only real in the mind. It is only in our minds that we can be citizens of seperate nations. And it is also only in our minds that we can be free as one people.

It is true that many of us have long since migrated out of Africa. We have developed different dialects of language, different styles of dress, different ways of cooking our food, different forms of religion. But deep down inside, if we look for it, and we don't have to even look very hard, we can see that we are still that African tribe of old called Humanity.