A friend and I were talking about attending a gathering. She said, will this be a gathering of friends or whole bunch of foreigners? I knew what she meant but I had to ask. What do you mean foreigners? You know; the Americans, I mean!!! They are not foreigners, I responded, we are in America for your information!!! We laughed. It sounded silly but significant. When will this come to an end, the division of us verses them? Isn’t “The earth but one country and mankind its citizens”? This was announced by Baha’u’llah over a century ago. Why we keep ourselves prisoners of our past outdated traditions and beliefs? Why we continue dragging prejudices born out of ignorance to the future and keep shooting ourselves in the heart?
A seemingly humorous composition in Persian is written called “Where is a Foreign Land”? or Essay Topic: Where is abroad? You can read it both in Persian and a very poor translation in English, (a great deal is lost in translation” thanks to technology bringing our bodies all together but cannot conquer the hearts that are possessed by prejudice and a pathological superiority complex.
موضوع انشا : کشور خارج کجاست؟
The composition is supposed to be written by a child or a young person from Iran. The social and psychological poison oozing from between the lines is far from funny but you cannot help but to laugh. It gives you a simple scan of the many and deep layers of religious, ethnic, cultural superiority mixed in a bedrock of ignorance and naivete.
Does this matter? In a wold where people go to jail for believing otherwise and children are infected with this deadly virus of prejudice and hatred and fear, the answer is yes it is deadly and we must take the tumor out!!
At least some of us got a good laugh at ourselves and the truth of our despicable situation. I really can laugh when the Baha’i children who are considered outsiders in their country because of believing “The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens”, can be safe and able to also laugh at this rediculous situation. At the moment, they are terrorized.
Keyvan
