Yet again the greatest threat to humanity is our inability to see we are all the same.

As the world shrinks in our increasingly digitized world the threat of xenophobia increases both in its destructive reach but also in the sheer sad irony of its existence in our modern age.

At no time in history have we been closer to everyone else on this little blue dirt ball of ours. We are mere keystrokes away, a few YouTube videos away from understanding in a much more authentic way what it's like to be say Chinese, or Mexican, or Italian. Our schools have never looked so diverse, our networks of friends never had so many shades of off white. And what do we learn from all of this, if we manage to take it in? That NOTHING of importance separates us. We all cry the same, we all suffer the same, we all laugh the same, we all bleed the same. Sure, vast differences abound in the food we eat, the ceremonies the partake in, the thanks we give, the things we say, but not in WHY we eat, why we partake in them, why we thank, why we speak. Those differences are to be celebrated as the wondrous diversity of culture that exists on this planet but MUCH deeper than that is the realization that the food you eat to celebrate your lunar new year, may be different than the food I eat to celebrate my Jan 1st new year but the smiles on our faces and why we do it is exactly the same. The inability to see this is what is going to fucking doom us all. And at a time when we are SO fucking close to each other, when so little separates us.

The pacific ocean separates North America from Asia and in the 19th century that gap seemed every bit just as large as it is geographically. But now there is little that SHOULD be alien about almost any culture, and indeed little that is or ever was. And yet we find ourselves at a time where we are treating the "other" as "the other" with fear and mistrust, or even as savages. We have governments that want to build walls, people marching in the streets "don't bring your dirty people here". And no I'm not just talking about the US, this is a global trend.

What hope is there for us if we can't see the human in the other when we live in a global village?