Sinister Thoughts

Tuesday is here again. Funny, how that happens. Every day a new day. And it’s quite obvious (to me) that I don’t have a thing to write about. I’m just typing some nonsense here to pass the time till a real thought occurs. I hope it happens soon…

Perhaps if I were to take a look at the news? Nope; nothing interesting there.

I might mention the education crisis in California and elsewhere. It’s really a complex problem, both social and economic. Although I do believe the social problems originated because of the economy. But that’s a really long story…

Or this; I had been writing something on xenophobia yesterday when I suddenly had a memory problem (computer memory) and had to shut the computer down. I hadn’t been able to save the document before I did this and so I thought the document was gone. Darn! But this morning my lazy memory came to the rescue. I had almost forgotten that you can search for lost Word documents by doing a file search for files with an .ASD file extension. Just type “*.asd” in your file search window and it will locate all Automatically Saved Documents. Once found, these files won’t have a familiar name; they use a combination of letters and numbers, but you might spot the one you want by the creation date. Then double click the file and it will open in Word. After you determine that it’s the one you want, save it under the correct name.

So what was I writing? Here it is…

Xenophobia = A dislike of foreigners.

It seems to be everywhere these days. And I’m still baffled by it. I’m just as different from my neighbor next door as I am different from the man who lives in Guangdong. And at the same time I am just the same as that man in distant China, or Hungary, or Mexico. All the things that make you and me human are experienced by us all in much the same way. We eat, we breathe, we sleep and we bleed – all the same.

But xenophobia has a long history. In my own case, my Scottish ancestors were hated by my English ones. Scots were lower than the animals, pagan savages and not worthy of breathing God’s fine air. They were tortured and killed at every opportunity. Some of those Scots made it to Ireland where they were just as despised as the Irish were. And of course once the Irish made their way to America, they found that they were no better off than at home, as far as social justice was concerned. The Irish and the Chinese were equally despised by the “Good Americans” and given only the meanest of jobs. Poles, Hungarians, Japanese, Hmong’s…all have suffered.

I doubt that there is any one group that hasn’t been touched by this hatred of petty differences. Believe it or not, at one time, even those who had the misfortune to be left handed were singled out to be mistreated – or killed. Things were so bad in the 1600's that “lefties” were burnt at the stake. In English the word left comes from “lyft” meaning worthless. In Italian, the word “sinistra” or sinister is used. (Over the year’s “science?” has claimed that the left-handed are prone to all manner of ills. Alcoholism, autism, bed-wetting and brain damage, immune disorders, even a shorter life span are just some of the problems linked to left-handedness.)