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| “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” |
| The following excerpts are taken from a best selling novel by the same name and written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author named Thomas L. Friedman who also wrote “From Beirut to Jerusalem” and “Longitudes and Attitudes”. |
| These two excerpts talk about “globalization”, which is the international system that has replaced the cold-war system. |
| World affairs today can be explained as the interaction between what is as new as an internet web site and what is as old as a gnarled old fig tree on the banks of the Jordan River. |
| Did you know that there exists in Tokyo City Japan that is located right outside of Tokyo a Lexus luxury car factory that produces 300 luxury sedans a day made by 66 human beings and 310 robots? The human beings are there mostly for quality control. Only a few actually screw on bolts or solder parts together. The robots do all the work. The robotic trucks haul parts around and beep when a human gets in their way. One robot applies molten rubber in a perfect rectangular shape around the front windshields. When it is finished there is always a drop of rubber left like a bit of toothpaste left hanging over the tube and the robot swings it's arm around in a wide, perfect loop that hits a thin, almost invisible metal wire that slices off the leftover rubber and leaves the finger clean to do the next window. How much planning, design and technology did this require to get the robot to do its job and then swing around at such a precise angle to snip off the extra little bit of rubber? This is impressive stuff. |
| On the other hand, the author, while riding a Japanese bullet train from Tokyo City back to Tokyo and eating a sushi box lunch that can be bought at any train station, was reading about what was happening in the Middle East, in Beirut and Jerusalem, to people he had lived with for many years. He read a story that agitated the Arabs and the Israelis over a controversial interpretation of a 1948 UN Resolution relating to the right of return of Palestinians to Israel. It occurred to him that here he was on a speeding train coming from a factory where the Japanese was building cars with robots and over there in another area of the world people were fighting over who owned which olive tree. |
| This, he thought, was a prime example of the post cold-war era: ½ of the world, sometimes ½ of the same country, and sometimes ½ of the same person caught up in the fight over who owns which olive tree. Olive trees symbolize roots and warmth of family and belonging whether in a country, a town, a tribe, or a family. It locates for us a place called HOME. It gives us a confidence and security when reaching out to others. We fight for our olive trees that give us feelings of self-esteem and belonging as essential as food in the belly. You can be a rich or a smart person alone, but you cannot be a complete person alone. You must be part of and rooted in an olive grove. |
| This identity, however, is sometimes taken too seriously to the exclusion of others such as what happened in Nazi Germany, or the murderous Arm Shinrikyo cult in Japan or the Serbs in Yugoslavia. They lead to the extinction of others. Fighting over who owns which olive tree is really a fight over who fears their whole sense of home will be lost and the fear of being under someone else's thumb. Without a sense of home, they cannot take their shoes off and relax, so they die, kill, sing, write poetry and novelize about it. Without a sense of home, life becomes barren and rootless and life as a tumbleweed is no life at all. |
| The Lexus represents an equally old human drive-the drive for sustenance, improvement, posterity and modernization and the pursuit of higher living standards. There are some people that still upload for a living and not download. They carry wood on their heads for miles, plow while walking barefoot behind an ox, walking to a well and subsisting on a dollar a day. People have different and unequal access to new markets and technologies, but are still affected by them. |
| “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” relates to one of the oldest stories in the Bible, “Cain and Abel”. What was said by Abel to Cain to make him so angry that he slew his brother? Some Rabbinic scholars think that they were arguing over their mother, she was the only woman alive and each brother wanted to marry her. Maybe it was that Cain wanted Abel to keep his sheep off of his land or territory. It could have been an argument over where to build the Temple to worship in. The Rabbis noted that there were all of the elements of human motivation there in Genesis, the earliest book of the Bible: Sexual intimacy, need for sustenance, and need for a sense of identity and community. |
| The age old quest for material betterment and individual and communal identity goes all the way back to Genesis and is still present today in what is called “globalization”. |
“Take the first step in faith,
You don't have to see the whole staircase,
Just take the first step.”
- Martin Luther King |
| -- Brenda |
| 3/27/2005 |
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