My sister left Ukraine when she was 16. Unlike me, she’s very sociable. Knowing people is her whole job. She has crowds of acquaintances. And she speaks more languages than I do.
But her two best friends are Ukrainian. It took her a long time to figure out what was missing from her friendships. And then she met these Ukrainian friends and now can finally be herself.
What I’m saying is, people are not widgets. You can’t reshuffle them like playing cards and expect great results.
I watched a video recently showing the battle cries of different Indian military regiments during the latest India-Pakistan conflict, each tied to a particular state or ethnic group. I got goosebumps. And this is coming from someone who’s been living in the U.S. for 25 years and thought he had pretty much shed all ties to his roots. I grew up a Hindu vegetarian, started eating beef within a year of moving here (to give you one example of how far I went to assimilate). To be fair, I get equally emotional when I watch good americana content, but that makes sense since after all, I chose this country out of love. But still, I was surprised by how deeply India still lives somewhere inside me.
Something else that struck me: almost every single one of those battle cries calls on a god or goddess for strength. It’s remarkable when you think about it. Imagine some activist or NGO filing a case against this, arguing it violates India’s secular constitution. You can almost hear the argument: “If Hindu and Sikh regiments are allowed to invoke their deities, shouldn’t they also also give space to Muslim battle cries too?” We all instinctively recognize how shallow that line of reasoning is, but legally, it’s hard to argue against under a liberal framework. Liberalism really does act like a universal solvent, dissolving everything in the name of neutrality.
Somewhat related, this reminds me of that research by Paul Bloom at Yale on how babies stare longer at faces that look like their own race. So far so good, seems like basic familiarity recognition. You’d think the takeaway would be that kinship is natural and innocent. But no, they call it “early racism” and say babies need to be reprogrammed. And of course, a few years later you get retard MacArthur Fellow Ibram Kendi’s How to Raise an Antiracist Baby topping bestseller lists. This is how the sausage gets made.
It’s wild. Same behavior, two takes:
Guess which one they’re pushing.
The baby of my friends from Africa hated me for the first few months of his life. It’s understandable, he’s not used to people looking like me. Maybe I should condemn him for racism. 😆😆😆
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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