Till Death Do Us Part

When I was a small boy, my father taught me one of the many lessons he's given me through the years: everybody is the same. With this lesson, my father showed me that one person separates himself or herself from another through perception only. Thus we get management-vs.-labor, left-vs.-right, man-vs.-woman and other two-sided concepts that make for easy comparison.

My family traveled from city to city, following my father's progression through the ranks of the business world. In our travels I discovered for myself that my father was correct. No matter what a person looked like or acted like, the person in front of me was made of the same stuff - skin, bones, and organs - and found ways to express actions tied to a central nervous system.

Therefore, my playmates were from many areas of the world, including the Indian kids who lived next door to us while my father was pursuing his graduate degree at a Florida university, and kids of many races who attended primary school with me in Tennessee.

My father and mother made sure my sister and I learned to count to 10 in more than one language, including English, Spanish, German, French and Latin (and later Russian - I would have to learn Chinese and Farsi on my own), so that we understood that the culture in which we were born was not the only culture in the world.

Why did my father and mother care about raising kids with a multicultural understanding? I don't know. I guess my parents are the results of WWII and want the world population to reach out to one another in order to prevent another worldwide war. I believe their generation succeeded. So far, the post-WWII military-industrial complex has only generated regional skirmishes.

We are all the same. We have differing opinions and modes of living that often conflict with one another but that doesn't change the fact we were born of the same species.

I just finished watching the movie, "The Entrepreneur," which reduces to an hour and a half the years-long process Malcolm Bricklin created to bring a new car line to the United States.

Despite our being the same species, our perceptions make a big difference, long ago turning regional groups of people into cultures. As our regional cultures merge more and more into a global culture, we will experience the pains and setbacks of misunderstanding that changing from one culture to another causes.

For example, the idea of trust is not universal, as Bricklin learned, because cultural expectations differ. A handshake is often only a matter of introduction after hours, days or months of negotiation, a starting point for the next level of business bargaining. In the movie, we watch Bricklin build relationships with people from more than one culture in hopes of setting up a distributorship for the Chinese-made Chery automobile. I hope Bricklin takes the long view with the Chinese deal and sees the future of U.S. distributorship of Chinese-produced cars as inevitable, despite the setback mentioned at the end of the movie. In my experience, legal paperwork is often only a suggestion, not binding, and the person who maintains the belief that a business relationship is lifelong or eternal (like a marriage) will be successful.

The potential for our species is unknown and thus as great as we want it to be. I believe it is not in our interest to promote one group of humans over another, culture being an artifact of, not a designation for, our species. Sure, as we move into the global arena in all aspects of our lives, some people will prosper greatly at the cost of many other people's lives - we've always been that way. Keep in mind that any one person can succeed - your background, your culture, your failures and successes, do not determine who you can or will be, only who you were at one moment. All moments in your life are yours in which to excel.