Parallels Aplenty

It's a sad and unfortunate truth universally that humankind exploits itself. Which is to say a more developed group of peoples will undertake to remove ownership, by means fair or foul, of the geography's original inhabitants. Historically this meant that the original settlers of the land were absorbed into the greater community and differences, over time dissolved.

In our modern era we see native peoples from Australia, New Zealand, Guatemala, Colombia, Brazil, Japan, India, North America, given low-status social designations, and treated with casual disdain by those whose purpose as conquerors it was to usurp them from their traditional lands.

These processes and procedures of human disruption and land distribution were not necessarily always undertaken with malicious intent, but it helped considerably to assuage the conscience of those doing the ousting to somehow believe that those they were displacing were somehow less human than they were, less deserving, less needful of what they had.

Assimilation and integration weren't necessarily the first options of managing disparity between the 'first nations' or indigenous peoples and those who came after. Separation, keeping the natives at a remove lest they sully the social fabric of the newcomers was the order of the day.

Now the situation of social stratification has its results, in endemic poverty, crime, substance abuse, suicide. Histories, antecedents, geography, politics may differ from place to place, with some countries making a far greater effort to ease the plight of those who were unsettled than others, but generally the disadvantaged remained just that.

These native communities, where ever they were, were truly dystopian. The people nurtured an aura of hopeless impotence brought upon them by strangers, foreigners to their land who usurped their rightful position as first-comers. Plagued by psychic defeatism, wedded to dysfunctional atrophy of purpose and hypertrophy of the spirit.

They succumb through inertia to an inability to do anything useful for themselves. Preferring to survive on guilty hand-outs by the governments which represent those who took their land. They survive bitterly on the memory of long-gone days made sweet in their remembrance of what once was.

Their culture becomes one of intemperance, nihilism, complete defeatism. They pose an existential danger to themselves through their neglect of their children and their children's futures. In few of these societies does their aggrieved anger and resentment pose a true danger to the society at large against whom they rail.

In this facet of their attitudinal defiance of destiny do the Palestinians differ from so many other displaced communities. They refuse to save themselves. They remain intent on destroying the presence of those whom they see as occupiers, and in the process will destroy themselves.