This I Believe: We Are All Related
(Original written submission for National Public Radio's "This I Believe" Story Program, by Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy, November 09, 2009)
We are all related. I believe we are, though we try our best to deny it. We have had our share of global family feuds that make the ferocity of the Hatfields and the McCoys look like child’s play. Even the Berlin wall – the 20th century’s most visible family feud - did not last, as we witnessed twenty years ago today. We have a very big, very dysfunctional family. But we have had our moments in history where we strove to preemptively fix the more crooked branches of the family tree. Isn’t that what the United States’ Declaration of Independence was shooting for? Wasn’t the equality of humans and an end to the bickering the premise of the United Nations? Equal and related, they go hand and hand for me, my version of blind faith. I believe it unequivocally and deeply. Maybe it should be the United Relations and the Declaration of Dependence. The old idiom states “you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.” Well, I believe that extends to the whole human race, so we won’t always be best friends with all our relatives, but we do remain related, for better or for worse.
When I swabbed my cheek awhile back for a basic DNA test I had no idea how profound the results would be to me. The blood of my father’s father’s father’s father’s father (you get the point) going back 60,000 years tells me that most of my distant cousins today are in the Middle East, Northern Africa, and around the Mediterranean – Israel, Egypt, Crete, Jordan, Greece, Sicily – this was supposed to be that intangible Hungarian side of me. Intangible is right. And this was just one line from so many in that complicated double helix still so full of mystery that we all carry.
Sure, we can claim countries, borders, religions, languages, cultures, customs, genders, tribes, political parties, ethnicities, sports teams and hometowns – and all of these are to be respected, embraced and explored. They make things interesting, but they also help us keep our more defined place in the world and I too have my moments of just wanting to be left alone to be a Yankees fan. But I believe we are one race, for better or worse, and we ultimately have so much more in common with each other as human beings. Imagine if this simple but powerful phrase lived on the edifices of our worldly nations, in the mighty documents of our civic order, in the faithful definitions that guide so many of us. Imagine if our world leaders embraced this in their negotiations and decision making. As we close this first decade of our new millennium, I take seriously the fact that embracing our relations, all of them, could be our salvation. Because I believe we are one people at heart. So let’s send out the invitations for the next big family reunion! We are all invited. We are all related.
