Many people are commenting on the Moslem cartoon fiasco. Those who are not attached to a position are trying to understand how such a gross incompatibility of culture view can be accommodated without constant strife.

They are all looking in the wrong place.

Some are looking in the wrong place deliberately because they have an agenda.

Others are looking in the wrong place because they can get some attention or mileage, as in Fox News and Jim Lehrer.

Most people are looking in the wrong place because they just haven't noticed something relatively obvious:

You can't look at reactions to the reactions to the reactions and expect to find therein a solution, or as Einstein pointed out, the solution can't be found within the paradigm of the statement of the problem. (Sorry, but I love the elegance of linguistic logic.) The plain truth of it is that the solution to the problem can't be found by looking at the problem, but rather by looking at the world that exists when that problem is no longer there. Where does that world exist? In your imagination. That is called creativity.

The fact is that this is not so difficult to do. Nor does it take an extraordinary imagination and creativity.

What stands in the way is a lot of investment in the problems we'd like to disappear, and therefore a lot of resistance to doing anything that might solve these problems. The investment exists within small social hierarchies in Moslem communities as well as American towns and churches, and the investment exists in large corporate structures that are global--structures that encompass both islamic and every ethnic brand of humanity currently on the planet, with the exception of those tiny enclaves of "3rd world" cultures on the Pacific Islands and elsewhere.

Never the less, it is possible to create solutions within our own economic islands, right here, wherever you happen to be, and within the global community, that can erode the "problem" culture from the inside out.

Technology can and does facilitate such solutions. Again, I apologize, this time for speaking in general rather than in terms of a specific example. In part, I don't have time for that right now, and in part, I have not come up with a 25 word description. But if you think in terms of common social activities, events and locations where community occurs around you, particularly those which are commercial, and ways in which technology can be implemented there to create opportunities for cross-cultural communications, experience and relationship, perhaps you will come up with some ideas yourself. Bear in mind also that in many places in America, like the place I live, you may not run into a person of an unfamiliar ethnicity on a daily basis, and if you do, you won't communicate.

Remember--it's not about the symptoms. It has nothing to do with the rationalizations for behavior we've seen recently nor about the issue of free speech nor even the emotional state of those who are acting out. It has everything to do with the way people learn to perceive the world, how they define the world and how they experience relationship with the world.

Michael Winn
http://thedelmarnews.blogspot.com