kinds of people
There are kinds of people.
Shuky gets back to his wrongly parked BMW, with his mobile phone and two packs of Nobles in one hand, and one just lighted in his mouth.
Mrs. Edelstein annoys his neighbors playing Chopin all evening.
Ernesto slowly grills half a cow in his backyard on Saturday, which again offends Shabbat observant Elishai next-door.
Society is built like a honeycomb, with every individual falling into one hexagon of cultural background or in the gray border with one or two more classes.
Behaviors that are normal, rejoicing or necessary to one kind of people, deeply bothers people belonging to different cells.
The only hexagon with neat, grey less borders is that of the people that vehemently claim that there are no hexagons, that we all belong to one big cell called human kind.
They are also the easiest to single out in the crowd, with signs that vary from society to society. They go to certain cafes, they read certain newspapers and dress alike. They are usually well set up economically and their love to other humans come more as a workaround for their guilt than from any sincere feeling. They feel ideological love, not personal.
If everybody would suppress the part of his behavior that inflicts discomfort in any other group, we would end up loosing all cultural identity. That’s why people tend to group in neighborhoods, cities and nations with people alike, so that they can keep being themselves without living in an everyday war with other citizens.
So how can we survive together in Israel? We have no idea, so we opted for killing ourselves on the roads, and eventually shooting each other for a chair on the beach, or yelling to each other on the line at the supermarket.
We tend to think that our intrinsic violence comes from the political tension of the Israel-Palestinian issue. I’d rather blame it on our cultural differences and how hard it is to live all together.