It's a beautiful world

I don't know about you but I think races were meant to be mixed. I was convinced of that even before I got here looking at pictures of Brazilian models (Adriana Lima = Yum!), but three weeks in the Netherlands convinced me even more. That's why I don't understand racial purists. The Netherlands itself is a wonderful model of racial integration, and integration here includes the carnal variety. Last weekend, I was in a local church in Utrecht and there's this whole community of Filipina women married to Dutch men, and I tell you their kids were beautiful. More beautiful than the sum of their genes. Somehow in the union of Filipina and Dutch, nature took the best features of both parents… and enhanced them, taking liberties with its own laws to produce offspring that looked only vaguely like their parents.

A colleague of mine here in the bank, a black American, has hooked up with a white girlfriend. He once said he'd have second thoughts about doing that back home because of the possible disapproval of the black community. And America is supposed to be this land of equality. Pfsh. I remember Tiger Woods marrying his caucasian girlfriend causing quite a stir. "What, black women aint good enough for ya, biatch?" The black community seems to have arrogated Tiger unto them, hence their disappointment at his choice of the woman who would share his life. But Tiger is as much Asian as he is African, hence his balking at the term African-American when the media uses it to refer to him. And being of mixed parentage himself, he probably has an innate knowledge that his choice was perfectly normal.

At the Rotterdam Summer Carnival, I caught a glimpse of how beautiful the world is. We went there on my first weekend here, July 31. We were a veritable Bennetton commercial: a colleague from England and me, and our buddies from the bank, the aforementioned black American and a guy from Curacao, who supervised our project. When we got there, the bands were already playing, and the DJ's were spinning, the parade was just about underway, but what struck me the most was the people on the steets. They were of every shade of color there is: East Asians, South Asians, Caucasians, Middle Eastern. White, brown, black, and all shades in between. We parked ourselves right in front of the stage where the DJ was spinning Latin-flavored dance music and of course there was multi-racial, multi-colored dancing. And after a couple of beers, I have to say I represented Asia quite well, thank you very much.

I remember thinking, Why can't it always be like this? Why cant we all get along? In the Middle East, the Arabs and Persians are climbing all over each others back to be the first to eliminate the Jews, who are just as ready to render unto them that which they wish to render, but it wasn't always like that. They got along fine as recently as the 1940s. In fact it was Saladin, the great hero of Islam, who invited the Jews to return to Jerusalem after their massacre and exile at the hands of the Crusaders. It's quite clear that the world today is run by idiots and it would be easy to conclude how ugly it is and the rest of the species on this planet would be better off without us.

But it isnt ugly. We're all meant to live together and marvel at our diversity. We're all meant to learn from each other, help each other, work with each other, play with each other, and if truth be told, boink each other as well. There is no master race, there is no inferior race. There's just the human race so put on your sneakers and run in it. The world is beautiful.