In Ireland, it's all a matter of how you open your egg. Protestants and Catholics have a different opinion on the matter. Catholics of course believe in the centuries old tradition of eating their eggs from the small end, while Protestants believe in bottoms up all the way. The problem is, eggs are a pretty big deal, and how you open your eggs determines whom you hang out with, and whom you wish to hang. This egg problem is a global one, as Moslems and Christians, Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and Turks, Hutus and Tutsies all have their own egg beliefs that they will permit no one to transgress. So groups of folks live apart, tend their own fields, have their own separate sets of friends, and its all because of their eggs. Of course, most reasonable people believe that eggs may be opened any which way, but that leaves us with the problem of dealing with a century's old tradition of egg beliefs that have for millennia set in a wild bloodlust country against country, tribe against tribe, and neighbor against neighbor.
Thus I Mezmer propose a modest solution to the Irish problem. Send out squads of secret police during the night and round everybody up. Then separate all able bodied men and women from the children, the old, and the infirm. Bring them to a large stadium, and have some of them dig trenches paralleling the bleachers. Then divide them up into mixed groups of twelve or so, and lead each group out singly into the field. Then give the signal to the guards, and...........
PLAY BALL!
Thus we have the solution to the Irish problem: forcible baseball. Now of course the reader will naturally be skeptical of how team sports can eliminate ethnic tensions that have lasted hundreds of years. Indeed, how can baseball resolve high-falutin' metaphysical issues that have set Catholics and Protestants at each other's throats for centuries? Because it wasn't deep thinking that set them at each others throats, as thinking had little to do with it.
Our cerebral noggins are after all limited in terms of the people and events they can perceive and model. Indeed, if we had to think about and feel for everyone and everything that was important, our heads would figuratively explode. So our brains simplify or parse the world, and mentally model only those events and individuals who we have to deal with to get through the day.
If there are only a few simple things we have to know about, then our world will seem simple, and we will act accordingly. I turn on the light switch and the light comes on, and ask a waiter for a menu, and get one. I don't however start thinking about the physics of electricity or the psychology of waiters because I don't have to. Because its not important, or will likely not signify its importance (as when the power fails or the waiter doesn't return), light switches and waiters become very simple things.
As the saying goes, out of sight is out of mind, and the further out of sight one gets, the more mindless one seems. For people, the further away they get from us, the simpler do their minds seem to be. So your wife is complex, your aunt less so, and when you get to your eighth cousin in Switzerland, he becomes a mere cipher. And of course, we can erase ciphers all day and still get a good night's sleep. Or as Stalin once said, the death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a mere statistic. When we lose perspective, invididuality blurs, and people become as indistinguishable and mindless as a horde of stupid clucking chickens. Thus, if a million Irishmen, Hutus, or Chinese are slaughtered by their neighbors or are swept away by a flood or volcano, so what? They are a million miles away, think simple thoughts, have one track minds, and merely make clucking noises.
It is the trivial issues that form a folkway of isolationism that leads in turn to the eventual mores that make hatred honorable. When people are separated becuase of the color of their team jersey, an obscure tenet of their religions, or the side they open their eggs, they become social insects, single dimensional creatures with one track minds. But force them together in a common cause and then they have to cooperate, know each other, and become human again. We become deep thinkers when people are represented to us as deep, as empathy follows when we have to become empathetic to survive. Otherwise, its easy to classify people and their motivations with simple minded metaphors that diminish them, and make them prey to equally moronic philosophies that sanction prejudice, hatred, and murder.
So baseball's the key, or in truth anything that compels cooperation. If not, then life will always be us agains the insects.
Note: In a similarly named essay, Jonathan Swift suggested that Irish children be roasted and served up for dinner like suckling pigs. It was to his great chagrin that a lot of people took him seriously, and actually approved.
