one!

The Western world has been raised in dualism.  Opposites, when they hear 2 sides to every coin, the sides are separate and that coin in the middle is nothing at all.  We believe in GOOD and EVIL, black and white, male and female, war and peace, love and hate.

OPPOSITES--antonyms are not the same, for while they have opposing meanings, they are not big, and they are not the basis for having a very concrete mind.  For a lot of people, KISS is the answer, from a menu to the way to run the world.  (KISS is an acronym not an exchange of body fluids in this paragraph)

In nondualistic philosophies, the coin is ONE.  One coin, two sides of ONE coin.  Perception is not concrete.  Good and evil are not opposites but a continuum--like ombre'.  Black and white are nothing more than the degree of presence of light.  Male and female are both humans but have either XX or XY.  War and peace are not opposites, but choices of how we handle disagreements--and in peace, people still die and sometimes treat each other horribly and in war, sometimes people live and show their most humane side.

No opposites, just continuums of one thing.

ONE.

What if we focused on that oneness.  What if we started with our labels.  And not to take anyone's choices, but what if we start with those many RACE, ETHNICITY, CULTURE questions that are all over every form we are asked to fill out from birth on.

If we just added HUMAN to the race choices, how many people filling it out would start only using that choice.  And Ethnicity, ( to a shared culture and way of life) is currently used to mean Hispanic, although it is frequently used as a choice under race where the KISS was overused.  Not to overdwell, but hispanic is not a culture or ethnicity or race, its a language group, and if we expanded it to include french and italian we could use the label Romance languages.  It is a choice on our labels choosing lists, because we have become obsessed with the number of people coming to the USA from noneuropean nations.   I have also seen people that are here in the USA very confused by the fact that their only choice is AFRICAN-AMERICAN.  I have never seen anything that offered the choice of European-American or Australian_American.  And apparently, black people from Europe or Australia are also African American.  If we are going to settle for a label of ultimate cradle of life--African would fit us all.

But shared culture and way of life?  We all eat, sleep, drink, reproduce, are born, live, die.  We all share that.  But the people 2 blocks over eat different food than I do, believe different things about where we come from and where we are going when we die.  They choose different words to describe things, have different goals, make different amounts of money, and like doing different things for fun.  And we have all the same labels on those category choices.

Don't get me wrong.  I am not asking for more choices for specificity.  I'm asking if we can't have a choice of being less specific, less divisive.  Why ask my sex?  If you want to know if I speak English or need a translator, ask that--it could be important, but wanting to know what language my greatgrandmother spoke has no purpose.  And race is not a single answer for that many people.  Great and great-great grandparents  occasionally led more complicated lives than the Victorian stories would like us to believe.   We are complicated individuals, but we--the totality of we are pretty simple.

WE ARE ALL HUMAN.