Seven years ago, on a scuba diving excursion in Mexico with my family, far before my husband Boudreaux and I were even engaged, we ran into a fellow American on the boat. He said to Boudreaux:
“You’re a MOT, right?”And Boudreaux’s like: “What?”
And the guys’ like: “Member of the Tribe”
And Boudreaux’s like: “What?”
And the guy’s like: “You’re Jewish, right?”
My husband is not Jewish. He’s Irish-Italian Catholic. But this small exchange revealed just how much I didn’t understand about the modern tribal world.
A tribal distinction includes a smaller, more intimate group. One with the capability of uniting against some external oppression. As we traveled through Israel, learning about Zionism and the Jewish immigrant’s original settlement, we understood even more.
Though technically full of “tribes” formed by religion, genes or common interests, empirically, America was perhaps the antithesis of such a thing. For a few hundred years, we’ve been waving our welcoming arms of immigration and religious freedom. I know that’s not exactly the case today. But I still believe that America is less about a single tribe and more about uniting a mass of tribes in solidarity.
But throughout our journey, we noted that America seemed unable to shake their shameful shadow and we understood. From fellow travelers, we were grimly reminded of our tawdry pop culture exports, strict border officials and score-obsessed teaching methods. From Arabs, along with bottomless cups of tea, we’ve choked down a lot of humble pie as they took pleasure in explaining just what was wrong with President Bush or Condoleeza Rice. Sometimes we agreed. Other times we did not.
But despite a current dearth of American diplomacy and a very unpopular President, I’ve remained fairly patriotic. Hate us or love us, democracy, as Winston Churchhill says, is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones that have been tried so far.
Yet I have also recognized the risk in clinging too tightly to the tassels (or crust, Philip) of the blanket on which we were born. Perhaps because of what I saw and heard.
We volunteered picking olives in Turkey, listening to one side of the vicious battles between Turkey and the PKK—an endless tribal conflict. We crept through the souks of Syria, while the Assad men, one responsible for the genocidal massacre (between 10 and 25,000 killed) to quell Sunni radicalism in Hama, watched from their cult of personality posters. In Beirut, we lived on the conflict-ridden line between Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods and worked at coffee shops in the recently attacked Hamra area. We spent Holy Week in Jerusalem, where we stumbled upon the fresh police tape surrounding the spot where a Palestinian had just stabbed a rabbi. We crept into Ramallah and back across an unbearable border crossing where the texture of tribal suspicion is symbolized by a football-stadium-like cage grate and five-inch thick glass. At the University of Kurdistan, we watched a student protest against the Turkish incursion of Northern Iraq, another tribe desperate for a homeland to call their own. In Kenya, we visited the IDP camps where thousands of Kenyans live due to the post-election violence and destruction against Kikuyu tribe members since the unpopular president holding power is of this particular tribe.
I understand the fierce grip a heart can have on its identity. And I certainly understand the need for a territory of one’s own. Like screams to like in this big world and I am no exception. Also, as I see the West’s most popular, yet least appealing imports–satellite television, mobile phones and video games–infiltrate even the smallest village, I want to help them hold onto their culture. To preserve whatever might be left. This too, is a part of tribalism.
However, in that hemisphere, tribal membership wasn’t just something, it was everything. With which jihad you engaged. Where your loyalties would always lie. It determined the face you slept with even if you wore a different, perhaps comfortable mask all day long. It defined which side you fought for. And they were always fighting. If the veins beneath our skin sketched to form our own personal atlas, then this affiliation was the blood within them. It kept pumping, oblivious to logic, reason, societal evolution and change.
So am I MOT? Well, yes. I am a member of a tribe called America. A tribe which unites sundry socioeconomic levels in relative unity. A tribe which dances to a million drums in relative peace. I am eternally grateful for my roots.
But when I returned this last August, both humble and nationalistic about my homeland, I came back to a lot more tribalism than I remembered. Yard signs were creating neighborhood disputes, insult-hurling emails flew between inboxes and simple respect seemed to have slipped out of sight. Arriving directly from Rwanda, where tribal conflict caused nothing short of a genocide in the 1990s, I didn’t like it. The polarization was alarming.
Three months later, I still don’t.
I’m ashamed of the lack of tolerance. Not of muslims or gay people but of people who disagree with you. I’m ashamed of the belligerent behavior. How people claim to be so open-minded, but, as it turns out, only if you’re voting as they are. No one seems interested in having an intelligent, point-counterpoint conversation to actually learn something, but only in preaching to their own safe, choir.
Ugh.
