A Meditation on Humanizing Mankind

Pictures by J. 
 Dear, you rock all the way to the edge of your stem cells. Happy birthday to you as well and I wish for you all that you wish for.

Happy birthday Senator Fulbright, your gift keeps on giving, your legacy instills all of us with awe and commitment, your ideology has a cancerous behavior with a viral outreach. Long may your memory endure.

"Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations. Man's capacity for decent behavior seems to vary directly with his perception of others as individual humans with human motives and feelings, whereas his capacity for barbarism seems related to his perception of an adversary in abstract terms, as the embodiment, that is, of some evil design or ideology." [Speech to the Council on International Educational Exchange, 1983]

 "International educational exchange is the most significant current project designed to continue the process of humanizing mankind to the point, we would hope, that men can learn to live in peace--eventually even to cooperate in constructive activities rather than compete in a mindless contest of mutual destruction....We must try to expand the boundaries of human wisdom, empathy and perception, and there is no way of doing that except through education." [From remarks on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Fulbright Program, 1976]

This week-end has been fruitful in all kinds of celebrations, food, laughter, and conversations: a versatile meditation over our own passage through the U.S. from rich souls of different perspectives, different majors, different countries, sharing passionate tendencies and commitment overdrive and the audacity to stand by ideas and concepts, live by them and fight for them.

Among the intimate exchanges we shared, the one D. and I were hung on was the human condition: perhaps, it's PhD in philosophy, perhaps it's the sewers of humankind where we delve in, perhaps it's Z. psychological and gender studies, but it was a long meditation over what it meant to be human, and when one answers to such a title: All of us have had our fair share of human interactions in this country and witnessing and living through alienating episodes or humbling ones, and so we were discussing the difference between when a biped is more of a puppet than a social animal, when a social animal is more of a creature of mind than a self-aware life form, when a self-aware life form is more of a bundle of thoughts and emotions than a consciousness able to react, assess and process and grow, and when... and when, and when...

There is no end to it, there is a feel to it though. It will take more writing, so much more writing Senator, so much more coffee, exchange, experiences. It will take more lifetimes. I am grateful nonetheless. There is a lot of personal stake on the Fulbright legacy on an intricate scale and every time, I rediscover it and find out it grew and unraveled some more and it instills in me a terrible and fascinating sense of inner awareness.