Lessons From The Middle East
As I begin this blog, I have just returned from nearly three weeks in the Middle East. (Note to our sponsors, community partners and members: NOT ONE CENT of Humanity Project money was spent on this trip. I think it’s important to emphasize this point.) I visited Egypt, Jordan, Oman and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates as part of a writing assignment — as some of you know, I’m a longtime professional writer. I say all this as context for a few preliminary thoughts about my experience. You probably won’t be surprised when I say it was an amazing voyage for me. Many of the things I learned have a significant bearing on the work of the Humanity Project, one way or another. This organization is about using cooperation and social connection to improve individuals and our society. I came away from my last stop, in Cairo, with the strong feeling that the world needs each of us to find ways to bridge the cultural misunderstandings that artificially separate our Western nations from the Middle Eastern countries. We simply don’t understand each other because we don’t really know each other. I think it’s as simple as that. We have little opportunity to relate as individual human beings and so we fall back on the most obvious characteristics as we try to make sense of one another: very different religious beliefs, for instance, and divergent ways of looking at the world. But underneath these cultural and social differences, we’re all the same. We are each human beings. That may sound like a cliche but it’s quite true, of course. I believe that the sooner we create new methods to connect as individuals among our cultures, the sooner the world will find greater peace among our nations. The Humanity Project is working on ways to help facilitate that conversation. We’ll tell you more about that in future weeks. The photo you see above is from Tahrir Square on Egypt’s Labor Day — and I was lucky enough to be there to take that photo this week. The people in this huge crowd were jubilant about the freedom they gained during the Egyptian Revolution three months ago. When I talked to them, one on one, they were proud of their victory and hopeful for a future of freedom and democracy and prosperity. They no longer seemed like a crowd filled with foreigners to me. They seemed like human beings struggling for a better life, exactly the same as each one of us. I found them warm, intelligent, passionate and deeply caring about each other. The more we can view our brothers and sisters in the Middle East through this more realistic lens, I believe, the more we’ll begin to recognize our common humanity. And that’s a win-win for us all.
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