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If you look at our world, you realize that in times of turmoil, it either allows us to make more enemies, or more friends. The weapons we create, whether it is a nuclear bomb, or an insult directed to someone, it still causes pain. I used to think that the wars, the battles, and the simple day to day arguments that take place due to cultural differences, were because we were all so different to be able to come to any sort of consensus. I thought that those cultural differences were what kept us from living amongst each other in peace. However, that is not always the case.
Just because someone or something is different than you doesn't exactly mean that it should become your enemy. Over the past year, I've seen the people around me join together regardless of their race, culture, or religion, for a single purpose.
While living in Egypt, I had the chance to experience the Palestinian-Israeli crisis first-hand. Some of you may think immediately that that is a bad thing, but in fact the situation isn't the way people think it is. Most people assume that the situation is two-sided, which each nation taking one side or another, but in fact, that isn't true.
Over the past six months, at the school I attend, without anyone asking we started fundraisers and campaigns for the victims of the Palestinian-Israeli crisis. Bake sales were held to raise money, scarves and kofeyas were sold in support of the victims, and donations were made to hospitals in the occupied territories. The entire school, each individual, even advisors, joined together for one purpose. Regardless of the opposition from the administration, we wanted to make a stance.
What allowed us to make the stance wasn't the similarities we have, or the fact that we attended the same educational institution, but rather it was because we had the understanding of each other's culture. It is irrelevant whether or not your culture is similar to someone else's but it is important that you are open-minded enough to try and understand the other side. You begin to realize while living in an international community like me, that the cultural differences aren't something that we should try to avoid at all times, but rather it is something we should embrace. By forgetting the stereotypes, or the bad first-impressions, but rather trying to find out for yourself and see the different variety of people around you is how you solve problems. It is how you create peace.
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Hye-Jin Lee
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This World Which Is Made of Our Love for Emptiness kerem ozkaya | May 19th, 2003
Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
This place made from our love for that emptiness!
Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.
Praise to that happening, over and over!
For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.
Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.
The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece of straw
blown off into emptiness.
These words I'm saying so much begin to lose meaning:
Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw:
Words and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.
by Rumi 1207-1273
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