four dividors

the sky is the limit!

this is what they told me when i first arrived in the promised land. everything seemed possible at the time - the land was limitless, as were the sky and my puerile curiosity.

many years later, i still believe in that. or rather, i actually believe that good things will happen here sooner or later here for people who do not give up. it is an incredibly fair country as far as countries go, the fairest of all the five i have lived in.

it is true, it is not the only place to reach for the sky but it is a pretty good one as far as they go.

the world is flatter now, and thanks to internet we do not have physical distances separating the way they used to separate us and we do not have library walls and borders separating, say, a young kid from a small romanian village from studying biology or mathematics.

but we still have four separators that we all need to work on. one down, four more to go, in any order:

(i) race - enough said, the wounds heel slowly and not being from this country, i cannot claim to understand the historical dynamics of the repetitive, seemingly endless racial debate. i do know, however, that i usually hope to see a person's mind - not their skin color, or the angles in their face - when talking to them, and what i see in most people are beautiful, intelligent thoughts. i feel bad for those who do not have those kinds of thoughts, since there is no skin cure or plastic surgergy for an empty soul


(ii) sexual orientation - the subtle or not-so sublte bigotry for 10% of minorities based on their sexual preferences

(iii) language - the greatest separator in my opinion

(iv) death - this separates me from my grand mother, and three of my friends who the time took away from me in my twenties

life is short, but not so short that each of us could not work on some aspects of all these dividors so they would cause less inhuman pain and suffering that no one deserves. write a book, shoot a movie. give a speech, but do not just go through life in an endless, unconscious motion of imitations as many of us do.

so, i hope that one day you get a chance to work on the timeless and the essential, and will not completely be suffocated under the inescapable, quotidian burden of the inessential and the transient. rush forward like a fearless surfer! call me an idealist, but the goal is nothing less than to scratch the face of the oblivion and the endless night of history itself!