What Do You Think You Are?
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| The human genome finds its root with one. We are one family despite family dramas. |
Although an effort to keep or sustain or hold onto one's cultural identity is attempted, notice how cultures constantly change.
A person may trace their heritage by blood back five thousand years and may be surprised to discover their ancestors spoke varied languages.
What those ancestors believed likely varied widely.
The way they dressed, what they ate, and how they lived reflect perhaps a particular generation... but not a constant.
The constant is change.
Both domineering and subjected cultures blend.
The blend may have been purposed from the top-down, but there is always an exchange.
Influence goes both ways.
It was not unusual for a conquering tribe to adopt ideas from the conquered tribe that benefited them.
One usually identifies what a dominant culture brings to the conquered, and this influence is often times vilified or denounced.
But what of the positive aspects that have persisted?
What of the good that is retained and forwarded?
When a person today calls themselves any certain identity, they are likely only identifying with a modern development... or nostalgically conceptualizing something from the past.
Although they may attempt to beckon an ancient constant perceived in their minds, they likely cannot identify the myriad of past influences from a host of past cultures.
Thus why there is no such thing as a __________ (fill in what you think you are) when all realities are considered.
We are all human beings separated only by time and geography, and that 'separation' is temporal.
What is any place on earth 'called' besides a human term attributed to a human idea usually related to nature or humanly centric?
Is a __________ (fill in any politically labeled nation or state or people) truly that?
Do people grow out of the ground as does a particular tree?
A tree can be labeled a certain strain because the roots feed from that particular soil.
But are humans rooted and sprouted from the ground?
Ideas rendering identities are always changing.
These changes occur very slowly during times of peace, somewhat quicker during cultural revolutions or warring conquests.
Notice how your vocabulary changes (or should expand) as you grow older.
Consider how some words are made popular, while some lose popularity and fall out of use.
The language you speak is a slow but constant flux similar to culture.
To use these three languages as simple examples, notice how those languages have adopted words from other languages.
Yet any given word (and more importantly its meaning) is not always transferred from its previous language.
Cultural constants found a thousand years ago where Arabic, English, and Greek originated are not as they are found today.
How will these languages be like, or current cultural identities look like, a thousand years from now?
It is possible such languages would have been translated into another language... a language not existing today.
It is possible these languages may cease to exist, as have many previous human languages.
What about those cultures and identities attached?
What about a blending world culture that is heading towards a reflection of past cultures forming now a single human identity?
Despite the pride that one particular culture may desire to project, notice how some cultures, in their pride, came to nothing.
Notice how, historically, languages cross political lines along with cultural attributes.
I say aim for the higher identity (children of God) that unites the past into one... even the body of Christ.
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