When Water is Thicker Than Blood

As human beings, it seems we are ruled by our libido and ego instead of our heads and the light side of our hearts. Of all the notable deaths of 2018 listed in the variety pages - as sad many of the celebrities' passing are - which one really should be publicly mourned, other than by their families? The passing of well-known names I'm sure will affect many who remember them through their works, but for me, the most notable passing of 2018 was the death of Zura Karuhimbi.

Karuhimbi's obituary is just awe-inspiring: She was an old lady from Rwanda who saved dozens from genocide. She had no weapons to defend herself when men waving machetes surrounded her home demanding that she hand over those she was sheltering inside. She did, however, have a reputation of being a witch. That reputation, and the fear it engendered in the group of heavily armed men, was enough to keep an elderly woman and more than 100 others safe during the Rwandan genocide.

Now, she wasn't a scientist, a singer, or comic book writer whose works spawned a marvellous movie franchise, but along with those worthy lives, hers is a life I also want to celebrate, and to mourn the loss of in 2018, because it is a tale of supreme in-your-face motherfuckery. This little black woman standing up to armed killers, and saving the lives of hundreds, makes my chest swell with the sheer balls of it. And when her tale reached the highest levels in Rwanda in 2006, she was awarded the Campaign Against Genocide Medal - by a president whose life she also helped to save 50 years earlier.

It also serves to remind me how lucky I have been in my life. I am lucky that I grew up in a family of poets - not related by blood or marriage, but ink. Their pages were always open to me, and sometimes, just sometimes, its water can be thicker than blood. The poet Walt Whitman had a lot to say on democracy, identity and the paradox of the self. His timeless advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life taught me how to stand firm when my knees felt weak. When Whitman suffered a severe stroke that left him paralysed, it took him two years to recover - and he believed his immersion in nature helped to heal him. I followed his lead: I see many others around me do the same today.

I took advice from E.E. Cummings - an artist who never cowered from being his unconventional self because, in the words of his most incisive and competent biographer, he "despised fear, and his life was lived in defiance of all who ruled by it". This surpasses the realm of creative bravery, it is about being brave in a world where every cue attempts to negate who you are. I took that to heart, and into my own life. Finding the courage to be yourself is hard, as Cummings said, in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else. It means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.

An Overture of Outrage

For some, hostility is an everyday experience. Ask any immigrant or person who happens to be the "wrong" colour. That hostility could spread in 2019: Larry Elliott, economics editor for The Guardian says years ending in '9' always seem to bring upheaval, and it looks like we are in for a hot one in 2019. A stock market crash, a trade war, an oil shock, political upheaval are all easy to identify as things to watch out for in the new year, but the event harder to spot will be the build up of outrage.

It seems everyone is outraged over something. My posts used to be about building bridges; today those bridges lie smouldering as I burn them with the fire of outrage I feel over the injustice and appropriation minorities suffer in their majority countries. I am for the ignored. I am for music artist Stormzy's cry against the violence suffered by the poor; I am for British artists who refuse Royal honours out of humility. I am for the Palestinian in Israel, as I am for the Kurd in Turkey. I am for the gay community in Russia as I am for the persecuted Muslim in Europe. I am for the persecuted Christian in Egypt and Pakistan, as I am for a Tibet free from China. I am for the peaceful minority of any majority. I am for dignified outrage that refuses to accept the major view.

I don't pick and choose my terrorists or genocides according to my own cultural bias. If you murder people en masse - your reason or your colour or creed is irrelevant - that is terrorism. America is as guilty of it as Turkey is, as Russia and Israel are, as the United Kingdom and Europe have been in times past. But so, too, are minorities who cause destruction and use violence as a tool of protest. Democracy is there to allow a peaceful voice to oppression; one wonders how much democracy has eroded in France for France's "gilet jaunes" (yellow vests) movement to take hold in violence. It may seem it's a push against fuel hikes, but if the far-right have hijacked the protests, it can only be because suffocating your minorities emboldens the majority to violence.

If the majority and its minorities have no shared community spirit, or it is broken down by populist politics and its media, then society will break down. Using the "shared identity" of a country doesn't work, because no nation has a clean slate. If that country doesn't represent all colours, to a minority that just means assimilation - or patriotism, as in America, stinks of hypocrisy. That hypocrisy has been magnified to superhuman proportions since Trump became the face of the continent's United States.

But that doesn't mean I fail to understand America or Turkey in their fight for sovereignty and peaceful borders, or recognise the good these nations have done. Israel, too, is not just its current politics: It's a beautiful country filled with amazing people. The same is true for every nation in the world - and every minority in that nation as well. As the world turns, we are dipped in both the light and the dark of the approaching day.

A Dark Side to Data

Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari is one of my favourite reads at the moment. He is assertive and enjoys to provoke debate - and although I don't agree with everything he espouses, he is a thoroughly entertaining read. A close Israeli friend put me on to Harari, and I am so glad he did - currently the historian believes we are in a struggle for control over our very souls as the big-data makeover of humanity could be a recipe for disaster. Great, like we don't have enough on our plate already.

Overly dramatic, but then Harari can be, and although I can't completely agree with Harari's belief that human beings are simply (complex but diagnosable) biochemical processes, he comes out with interesting sentences and delirious theories. Namely, if future AI (artificial intelligence) gets to know us (via computer algorithms) better than we know ourselves, then where does that leave free will? Are we replacing God with good programming?

The omnipresence of the Internet in society today is certainly godlike, and the data it has amassed on us in its second genesis with social media and mobile hardware may certainly reveal major trends, but even Harari admits that the potential of tech is so vast, we cannot predict what the world will look like in 30 years time. Meanwhile, predicting outcomes on data collection is not a new thing: it's just got bigger. Technology has helped widen the scale and possibilities, and there are lot of these theories out there currently.

I can't help wonder, though, if all the mass data stored online can predict our futures or help scientists predict outcomes - or does it merely help validate what we already know. If studying thousands of couples in a quest to figure out what makes relationships work leads to the discovery that lasting relationships come down to kindness and generosity, well then, isn't that common sense backed up by data? But what can it tell us about complete opposities who keep their marriages going without kindness or generosity? Or if your favourite colour is blue, you may be percentage-wise more inclined to buy clothes in that hue, but will the data ever reveal why you like blue so much in the first place? Or why you have an aversion to pink?

Harari is right that this type of data is valuable to a shopping site so intent on personalising your online experience to help make the decision for you to buy before you knew it yourself - but isn't that on a good day? And what about those of us born to defy the data? My favourite colour is red, but I don't buy anything in that colour to wear. More interesting to me, is the other data, then - the information that doesn't fit the major trend: That blip in a mass of dots and lines. If an AI bot really wants to know us, that is where it needs to look - in the unidentifiable, the uncertain and the ignored. In the same vein, if you want to know the majority, you need to look at its minorities.

Organic bias in predictability veers towards certainty, so this is not where an AI would venture - but it would make it smarter. Similarly in humans, when we only read or accept what confirms our bias, we don't learn anything new. We stagnate in certainty. It isn't real. Challenge is where we thrive. New challenges are the best. Gustavo Razzetti writing for Better Humans spins this as listening to the people you hate will make you smarter. But Razzetti recognises that it touches a personal chord: dealing with our enemies is not easy. It calls for confronting your own bias.

The Challenge of Being Human

Razzetti suggests separating the idea from the person, or not being so quick to judge - because we may hate them for reminding us of our own failings. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, a professor of practical ethics, looks at the other side of the coin: How can you be friends with someone whose opinions are so different from yours? Patient discussion in time spent together and respect for the opposite view may help overcome high barriers, Sinnott-Armstrong's opines, and I can attest to that. I have some good Israeli friends - one high up in the military - met through this blog, but we will never agree on the Palestinian issue.

Similarly, my American friends (especially the Trump backers) find my opinions a little harder to swallow - they are huge on confirmation bias. Putting assumptions aside, this is ironic coming from a nation that made the acceptance of different opinions a constitutional right. So, my best friends think that some of my deeply held beliefs about important issues are obviously false or even nonsense. Sometimes, they tell me so to my face. How can we still be friends?

Well, my friends are loyal and honest, good people. The old description of them would be "salt of the earth", and time - and our discussions - have only strengthened the ties of friendship. Plus, I always live with the expectation I am wrong, and welcome being proven so, because it means I've been given an opportunity to better myself. Reaching out to difference not only makes us aware of our foundational similarities, it makes us grow, because challenging our biases and using opposing views as a reference makes us stronger, and a better version of ourselves. I have my friends to thank for that.

Moreover, if religion or religious belief stops me from questioning my own bias, and is a part of my soul stagnation, then I choose to believe in something else. It isn't racial "differences" or stereotypes that have stopped some cultures progressing more than others - it is the religious practices that teach you to conform to one way, and never question your part in your life, which have held us back. I always believe our worst moments in hindsight are when we are at our strongest, and so I welcome that type of conflict. The year ahead may be a hard one, but it is a chance to showcase our strengths.

Life has purpose when you are fighting for it, but it has to be a valid reason, and the choice of weapon fair. You don't allow your outrage to turn into a wildfire: Burn bridges across deplorable ideals by all means, but not people. Even if you cannot cross those waters, they still connect us. I would never cross over to what Trump stands for, but I can connect with the love he has for his children as a father. Because what unifies us is the will of life: Survival of the species, protection of our young, wanting a better life for our families and communities.

This "will" is the basis of community spirit in every nation, even the ones we feel to us are the worst countries in the world. It was still alive in Nazi Germany, for instance. That will of life has no single colour: Nature is not majorly white or black or brown, it represents every single colour on the spectrum, because it is the physical basis for it. As an element of all blood is water, or like a little elderly black lady who bravely stood up for others not of her blood, she knew they were connected by deeper waters - the will of life that binds us all.

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