From: "Michael M. Butler" <butler@comp-lib.org>, Sat, 10 Nov 2001
>"Let the Afghans tell you"? Which Afghans, specifically?
Same answer.
Let them tell you. The Afghans are a fiercely independent, proud
people, with a rich history going back centuries, with deep inner
lives, with the last one or two hundred years tied strongly to their
land. The binding of that culture is their language and a
combination of the above. *They* know what is good for them, not
outsiders. The proposal that I heard yesterday of going with troups to
_their_ country and "rebuilding" (????) into a "new Afghanistan" made
me turn white. I didn't sleep well last night and the last nights
with what I'm hearing here and what I know regarding the war outside
my home.
It's not unusual to have splits or huge philsophical/religious
differences between a group of people who share the same language
within the same country's borders. In Germany, there are so many
variations (dialects) of the language, that the Northern Germans
even have difficulty understanding the Southern Germans and vice
versa. East and West are still communicating poorly, and with some
bitterness. The differences exist and you work with it, finding the
commonalities to communicate, and so that is what is done here,
sometimes successfully, sometimes not successfully between all of
the different ethnic groups, peoples, nations, religions.
The Europeans could learn alot from the Americans about how to "work
together", and the Americans could learn alot from the Europeans
about how to respect and care about enormous differences.
Right now the Afghans are really hungry and really angry. They've
had to fight two superpowers for 20 years who have devasted,
manipulated, meddled to an unbelievable degree. Now the extremists of
that culture are in power and I am not surprised about that.
Amara
P.S. I'm a lot closer to Afghanistan than you are, and I'm an American.
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Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com
Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/
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"Drosam pieder pasaule." (The world belongs to the brave.)
--a Latvian proverb
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