Our race makes us different

Dear Editor: Re: “Albas silent on Bernier remarks” by Loraine Stephanson (Courier letters, Aug. 24)

Especially when observing via reckless Twitter commentary an apparent increase in the politics of difference and racial division — that is, when people are not finding reason to kill each other on a sub-racial or ethnic level, such as with the 1990s Balkans and Rwanda — I’m increasingly convinced that humankind is overdue for an Independence Day-type alien invasion.

It would need to be one in which all of us subgroups of the human race are essentially forced to unite, attack and defeat the creepy invaders. The latter — who’d be the new (and hopefully last) Them — would have to be unlike our humanoid type, indeed as far as possible from being anything remotely like one of our Team Terra.

Unfortunately, though, it has to be asked: What will happen, say some five decades later, after all signs are long gone of the violent E.T. invasion we had victoriously overcome — when the politics of scale, to which we humans are so collectively prone, returns to the human-race fore?

Let’s not delude ourselves. There’s no greater difference amongst human beings than race — remove that entirely and left are less obvious differences over which to clash.

From the local municipality, to the regional, provincial or state, the national, international, intercontinental — with the greatest difference being that between our religions and races, and especially with the two combined, we, as a whole, can be relied upon to inevitably find reason to irreconcilably differ and seriously conflict. Frank Sterle Jr.

White Rock