[NYTr] "The Other" - A Commentary for Reflection

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

Progreso Weekly - Sep 8, 2005
http://www.progresoweekly.com/index.php?progreso=Ramy&otherweek=1126242000

"The Other"
A commentary for reflection

By Manuel Alberto Ramy

In war, whether we are right or wrong, or at least some reason to
assume it, "the other" is the enemy we must defeat. The dynamics of
the conflict erases the essential dignity of the human being in those
others. We kill them or they kill us; that's the personal equation and
the road to victory.

When wars are waged abroad, or against an invader in our own
territory, the other's condition as a person is easier to erase. That
other speaks another language, has another culture, and different
values and lifestyle, and the difference that in peacetime we tolerate
(more or less) in public, but not as an intimate conviction, reaches
satanic levels, a necessary evil to eradicate. But the perception
rebounds inside the countries in conflicts and penetrates the fabric
of society. In time, it becomes an everyday conduct in important
sectors

In the last century the United States took part in two world wars and
in another two of alleged local character, although instigated by
foreign powers (the U.S. in the case of Korea, and France - later
substituted by the United States - as a colonial power in Viet Nam).
On the other hand, the U.S. has also carried numerous open and covert
military interventions in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as
in the former Yugoslavia. Now it's back in business in Afghanistan and
Iraq.

U.S. military ventures in the lands of others and against others have
coined a castrated vision of the world we live in. In that manner, for
years we have witnessed of the conversion by the media of the concept
of the universe - which is unity in variety, the others with their
different characteristics - into sameness, which is an integral part
and a powerful tool of globalization imposed on the rest of the world,
e.g., values, lifestyles, behavior norms that we all should accept.

But it just so happens - as occurs in all empires - that violence
beyond the walls penetrates that society were there are also many
"others".  In the United States today, this rebound to the interior of
its society is promoted and increased by the economic and social
system that tends towards a greater reasoning to respect its own
neighbor in such a way that African-Americans and Latinos are "the
others". Beyond that, the vision and the propaganda repeated over and
over that the poor - whose numbers have grown by more than one million
and that the established system tends to foster increase - are not
products of the economic scheme, but of their innate inability,
reiterates a value that at least is translated into ignorance, if not
in contempt, of the humanity that is present in the other.

They are losers and capitalism is based on winners. The latter will
concentrate each day in a minority. Since losers have no possible
redemption, they must be kept in their ghettos and in their "citadels
of vice and disorder."

Those others I speak of have been the most affected by the tragedy of
Katrina in New Orleans, where 67 percent of the population is
African-American, and where 23 percent of its citizens live under the
poverty line. Most of the dead come from that sector, and not because
they are the majority, but due to their condition as leaders in
poverty. They hold first place among the others.

Between the excesses of Nature on one part, and the lack of foresight,
inefficiency, indolence of the local, state and federal authorities on
the other, some may think that an ethnic and social cleansing has been
made. I do not share such a radical view. I discard that deplorable
conclusion. But when I see and read the way that authorities, at all
levels, have responded to the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of
human beings, I can't deny the evidence: it's about "the others", the
ever present losers that are only the final outcome of the violence
intrinsic to the system, of their war-waging beyond its borders, of
the social promotion based on a cruel competition - which is also
violent in its own way.

As long as we don't see the others as possibly being each and every
one of us, in the end, we'll all be the losers.

[Manuel Alberto Ramy is the Havana correspondent of Radio Progreso
Alternativa and the Spanish edition editor of Progreso Weekly.]