The Colorful Painting Called Life

2500 different languages, 4200 different religions, 196 countries, and we are still one people. Humanity is our race. Diversity is our culture. Love is our language. People who worked on building the Tower of Babel died because they did not understand each other or communicate. They could not reach the heaven they were looking for. Perhaps they could’ve reached heaven if they tried to “understand other languages, other views, other narratives” as Morrison proposes in her Nobel lecture. Heaven lies in understanding one other, learning each other’s languages and stories. Heaven lies in embracing our diversity; our differences. It lies in leaving the dark cave and seeing the natural light of diversity; leaving the delusional world the media portrays to create divisions and living in the real world where we are one people. It portrays life as a black and white picture; where there is good and bad, beautiful and ugly. In reality, life if a colorful painting. The different colors give it meaning, and they are all perfect. There is no good without bad, no happiness without sadness, and no perfection without imperfection.

Throughout history, everything that is foreign has to be labeled as “barbaric”. Just because it is not the way you do it doesn’t make it wrong. The Lakota tribe, the Kiowas, and the Native Americans fighting against the North Dakota access pipeline are not “barbaric”. They fight for their holy land, for who they are. Imperialism is ephemeral. It doesn’t last long because it is not real; it’s absurd. It is just as absurd as eating bread butter and cheese for breakfast is on a Caribbean island. It turns you into someone you are not meant to be.

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives,” as Morrison says. We either “defend the indefensible” and absurd imperialism and justify the killing of innocent people or we use language to tell human stories of suffrage and educate others about the different cultures. We either use language to draw more people into the cave or use it to help them get out in the light. Many politicians use language to divide us and turn the best of us against each other.

No matter how hard they try, we will stay one people because we learned from our mistakes in building the Tower of Babel, and the World Wars. How beautiful is our luck to be living among the thousands of colors and languages of human beings that are to be shared using the most powerful tool; narrative.

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