The Dysfunctional Human Condition

Grievances that outlive their usefulness stall human beings in their journey toward progress. The non-aligned countries of the United Nations, the indigenous peoples who have in the past suffered the indignities and humiliation of colonization, the black African communities who were rounded up for slavery by dominating Arabs and Western colonizers, the North- and South-American Amerindians, the large black American demographic and the late-comer Palestinians, their embrace of their stale-dated victimhood has served to ensure they would far more often prefer to wallow in self-pity and a violent back-lash long after it served any purpose, than to actually further their conditions by a determined attempt to free themselves from the anger that permeates their cultures and forge on to make a place for themselves in the modern world.

Tribal, ethnic, clan and religious differences in a wider world that has long since viewed its former past as colonizers as distasteful to the progressive image they now have of themselves, only serve to continue disadvantaging those groups whose ongoing and burning resentment of having been made subservient to and dependent on others who traditionally dominated their cultures, their societies, their economies, their right to self-government.

The energy spent on hatred and blame, on the resentment that leads to ongoing dependence on placing guilt on the successor generations of those whose imperialist impulse toward geographic and resource-rapaciousness acquisition took them far afield in their quest to rule and colonize those countries less economically advanced than they, in a basically Europe-based (Christian and Islamic alike) compulsion of conquest serves now to alienate in a modern world that at least nominally accepts responsibility and seeks to placate through pluralist acceptance.

A refusal to be placated, an ongoing blame game and a backward-looking glorification of violent dissent and pride in emphasizing the once-dominated groups' cultural/social/heritage differences while degrading opportunity for advancement, results in a refusal to become integrated, to value education, to emphasize the positive features of their group assembly, embracing instead the destructive elements within them.

It is why blacks in America, indigenous populations universally and Palestinians in particular prefer crude violence against those they claim continue to degrade their human rights. It is why they are over-represented among prison populations resulting from their predation on their own groups as well as outside groups, it is why though they anguish over their past loss of dignity and equality, they do everything in their collective power to deny those achievable virtues to themselves since in doing so they reject values they consider not to be reflective of their own cultures.