I Am Ashamed

Pictured: harmless

by Alex in Epigrams and Interludes

I feel ashamed today.

As I was walking to work this morning, I saw a discarded poster lying on the ground, showing a man's face with a caption in Arabic. After a split second, I realised the flyer was for a candidate in Melbourne's recent local elections. This makes sense, since the suburb in which we live has a high proportion of families of Middle Eastern descent. But before that dawned on me, my first reaction was alarm.


For one brief moment, my mind filled with a panic stemming from countless hours of news footage of angry demonstrations and violent protests in the Middle East. From the many reports of political and social tensions to the the military conflicts and violent attacks that have maimed and kills thousands of people of various races and religions. For one split second, all of those images came flooding into my mind, and I was scared. And that shames me.

I've always considered myself to be an open-minded guy. I consider it a testament to the way I was raised that I'm usually able to look past the sensationalism of mass media, that conditioned response that tells you at a glance who the current 'bad guy du jour' is. I don't have to remind myself everyday to question the 'official' story being broadcast into my home, to wonder what details have been left out of the news reports to make them more catchy and exciting.

This morning I fell victim to the sensationalism, my fear hackles rising at the red Arabic writing like a dog salivating when he hears the dinner bell. I had always thought I was better than that. Hoped I could rise above the barriers that cause us to divide people into ideas of 'us' and 'them'. An arrogant assumption? Probably. But a noble goal? Definitely.

This knee-jerk fear I suffered is one of the most basic human fears - fear of the unknown, fear of that which we do not understand. At a primal level, this fear makes sense. If you don't know what this big wild animal in front of you is, it's probably better for your survival to assume that it's dangerous rather than friendly. This fight-or-flight response we feel when faced with danger is perfectly natural, and most likely one of the main reasons homo sapiens have been around long enough to grace the world with both Ice cream and Triple-feature-movie nights.

The pinnacle of human civilization!

Problem is, when this fear gets applied to other humans, the reflex tends to turn even the sweetest people into xenophobic douche-bags. There are all sorts of barriers that can come between people and stop us from understanding each other properly. Most commonly the having and not understanding of differing cultures, ethnicities and languages.

When this happens, our gut instinct is to regard the 'other' with suspicion and fear, if not outright hostility. This was the core of my experience this morning, however briefly. The language barrier between the flyer and me - specifically, that I can't read or speak Arabic - meant that I didn't understand what I was looking at and therefore assumed the worst.

Something good has come of this experience, mind you. Feeling ashamed has made me rediscover a big motivator of why I want to travel. The fear I felt today was fear of the 'other', of people who look, talk, dress and live differently to me. It was fear born of misunderstanding. And the only way to fix it, to break down those barriers, is to travel. I want to live with people who are different to me, to immerse myself in their culture, their language, so that I do understand.

If you'll pardon the cliche, our world is getting smaller, but we as people aren't getting any closer together. In such a crowded world, learning about and understanding other people is the only way we can hope to live with each other, and if we can't do that, we shouldn't be able to live with ourselves.

Since that ended on kind of a serious note, here's a picture of a dog in a hat.

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