Once again...

I apologize, but I can't stop thinking about the view I was trying to express days ago. I keep returning, at least intellectually, to this pervasive mentality of "Us versus them". And I keep returning to the seemingly unrelated work of Murakami ("Underground", Vintage Press, 2002). Hope you're ready for some new, lengthy quotes that epitomize my feelings on the subject. If not, move on, this isn't for you.

Again, Murakami writes:

"What alternative is there to the media's 'Us' versus 'Them'? The danger is that if it is used to prop up this 'righteous' position of 'ours' all we will see from now on are ever more exacting and minute analyses of the 'dirty' distortions in 'their' thinking. Without some flexibility in our definitions we'll remain forever stuck with the same old knee-jerk reactions, or worse, slide into complete apathy...

"No study of the rationale and working of 'them', the people who instigated it, would be enough. Necessary and beneficial though such efforts might be, wasn't there a similar need for a parallel analysis of 'us'?...

"Unpleasant though the prospect might seem, it is important that we incorporate 'them', to some extent, within that construct called 'us'...But even more to the point, by failing to look for the key buried under our own feet, where it might be visible to the naked eye, by holding the phenomenon at such a distance we are in danger of reducing its significance to a microscopic level...

"All I mean to say is that something in that encounter, in their presence, must also have been present in us to necessitate such active conscious rejection. Or rather, 'they' are the mirror or 'us'!...

"Now of course mirror image is always darker and distorted. Convex and concave swap places, falsehood wins out over reality, light and shadow play tricks, But take away these dark flaws and the two images are uncannily similar; some details almost seem to conspire together. Which is why we avoid looking directly at the image, why, consciously or not, we keep eliminating these dark elements from the face we want to see. These subconscious shadows are an 'underground' that we carry around with us." (197-199)

In my opinion this means that we reject or ignore personal responsibility for the world we live in. Instead, we point fingers at a distant, darker (figuratively and literally) Other. This Other is the mirror image of us, not only because we view it as the epitome of everything we fight against, but also because it would and could not exist without our presence. We exist in opposition to its "otherness", and it exists in opposition to our aspirations for world dominance. And yes, now I'm consciously and perhaps conveniently leaving "our" and "us" vague and utterly undefined.

The world does not exist outside of "us" and our relationships with "others", and it's time that we take responsibility for the role we play.

(I've replaced parts of Murakami's text with ellipsis' in an effort to keep the content general, rather than focusing on the Aum gas attacks. I feel the text is relevant outside of this context and should be heard in a broader, global arena.)