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Thought of the month ...

July 2011: The atrocity in Norway reveals cultural differences between Europe, Africa and the U.S. On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed almost 100 people in Norway, many of them still very young. Although shocked by this event, the Norwegian society reacts in a balanced and reasonable way, taking the event for what it is: the inhumane act of an person who lost his humaneness. (Aftenposten reports: "Det blir aldri som før. Men jeg tror det blir bedre, sier Henriette (12)" (see here; "It will never be as it was. But I believe it will be better, says Henriette (12)").

Not so the media in the U.S. A good example is the violent statements of the four women on "The View," who on Monday could not find words strong enough to not only dam the act and the guy but also to criticize the Norwegian society as a whole, which, as Elisabeth put it, does not even have a death penalty to punish the beast the he deserves. The focus in the U.S. is on punishing the perpetrator, the reaction in Norway is more on learning from the disaster and turning it into positive reactions, with large mass demonstrations over the weekend underpinning the humane societal values, and with young people joining the political parties, all of them across the political spectrum, in large numbers. But even Norway is somewhere in the middle in the global spectrum. On the other end of this spectrum, we have the southern African nations which to a large extent have the concept of Ubuntu embedded in their societies, understanding that there is a fine line between keeping one's own humanity or being dehumanized by the reaction to a perpetrator. In the U.S., perpetrators have a very easy game in dehumanizing the whole society (particularly those in the right wing of the political spectrum). On the other hand, as Antje Krog reports in her book "Begging to be Black," Mrs. Ngewu's response on prison sentences for those who killed her son during apartheid in South Africa shows a deep understanding for ubuntu. For her, not returning the evil that the perpetrators committed to the whole nation and re-accepting those who killed her son back into the community may help to restore their humanity and eventually open the door to gain back one's own full humanity. Since the 2-nd World War, Europe has made a lot of progress towards ubuntu, but the U.S. is as far away from it as Europe was in the Dark Ages. Sometime it requires a disaster as bad as the one inflicted by Anders Behring Breivik on Norway to reveal where our societies stands with respect to humanity.


If you have a story, thought, or picture worth to be considered as story, thought or picture of the month, please feel free to inform me about it by sending an e-mail to hpplag@unr.edu.