Despite their advanced knowledge and skilled work, Americans seem primitive in their approach to life and other human qualities in a way that is astonishing. This clear contradiction seems to have an impact on how Americans appear as a strange and odd people in the eyes of foreigners who observe their lives from a distance. It is difficult for them to reconcile the highly industrial civilization, precise business management, and life administration with this primitive sense and behavior, reminiscent of ancient times in forests and caves.
Americans seem primitive!
Americans seem primitive in their admiration for physical strength and material power in general, while they underestimate morals, principles, and ethics in their individual, family, and social lives. Apart from the workplace with its various types and economic relationships, the masses follow football games in a rough American style where the foot does not play a role, but rather the player tries to steal the ball with his hands and run with it to throw it into the goal, while the opposing team tries to obstruct him by any means, including hitting the abdomen, smashing arms and legs with violence and aggression. The sight of the crowds watching these games or violent boxing and wrestling matches, filled with animalistic frenzy, admiration for brutal violence, and lack of attention to rules and principles, is more focused on the blood and shattered limbs, cheering: break his head, break his neck, shatter his ribs, knead him. This view leaves no room for doubt about the primitive fascination with physical strength.
Not a peace-loving nation
With this spirit, the American audience follows the conflicts between groups and sects, as well as conflicts between nations and peoples, which has created a strange myth, propagated especially in the East, that the American people are a peace-loving nation!
Where are Native Americans?
By nature, Americans are warriors who love conflict, and the idea of war and conflict is strong in their blood and behavior, aligning with their history as well. The first waves left their homelands for America with the idea of colonization, competition, and conflict, leading to the fight against the original inhabitants (Native Americans) and the ongoing struggle to this day. The Anglo-Saxon element fought the Latin element there, pushing them to South and Central America, and the conspirator fought against their motherland, England, in the war of liberation led by George Washington until they gained independence from British history. The North and South fought a war led by Abraham Lincoln, marked by the "emancipation of slaves," though its true motives were economic competition. The slaves brought from central Africa to work on the southern land could not resist the cold weather in the north, so they moved south, providing cheap labor for the southern colonizers, giving them the economic advantage. Hence, the northerners declared war to free the slaves!
A Century of wars
The period of isolation has passed, and its policy has ended, when America entered the First World War, then took on the Second World War, and now it is rising in the war in Korea, and the Second World War is not far away! I do not know how that strange myth about this people's history in wars became prevalent.
Material vitality is sacred to Americans, and weakness - whatever its causes may be - is a crime, a crime that nothing forgives. If you are weak, no principle will help you, and you will have no place in the vast field of life. As for the one who dies, they certainly commit the crime of death and lose all their rights to attention or respect, just because they have died?
I was in George Washington Hospital in Washington D.C., and it was evening when an unprecedented wave of disturbance swept through. An unusual movement caught everyone's attention, and mobile patients left their rooms and beds to walk around and look. Then they gathered, wondering about the secret of this phenomenon in the quiet life of the hospital. We later learned that one of the hospital staff had been injured in an elevator accident, and he was in critical condition, even in the throes of death. One American patient went to see for himself, then returned to the onlookers on the walkway and recounted what he saw. When death looms over a place, it does not evoke fear, nor does death have its solemnity as it does in a hospital. This American started laughing and chuckling, pretending to be the dying patient, as the elevator crushed his neck, smashed his head, and left his tongue hanging from his mouth! I expected to hear or see signs of outrage and disapproval from the listeners, but their numbers made them laugh heartily at this disgusting performance!
Death in the American view
So, I was not surprised, and some of my friends told me what they saw and heard about death and its impact on Americans.
A colleague said to me: He had attended a funeral, where the body was displayed in a glass box - as is customary in America - so that the deceased's friends could see him and bid him a final farewell, and have one last look at him, one after the other in a long line. When they gathered in the reception room, people started joking and making fun about the dear deceased and others, in which his wife and family also participated, followed by joyous laughter, in the cold silence of death, and around the body wrapped in shrouds!
The director of the Egyptian missions in Washington, along with his wife, was invited to a party. Shortly before the event, his wife fell ill, so he picked up the phone to apologize for not attending the party due to this emergency. However, the callers replied that there was no need to apologize, as he could attend alone, and this would be a good opportunity, as one of the invited guests had suddenly lost her husband just before the party, and would be alone at it, so it would be fortunate for her to have a companion!
One day I entered the house of an American lady who was helping me with the English language in the early period of my stay in America. I found one of her friends there, and they were talking about a topic that had just ended. This friend said: "I was lucky, I believed in his life, so his treatment cost me very little because I believed in him in the form of the Blue Cross." She smiled and laughed!
Hearts of Americans
Then I excused myself and left, and I stayed with the lady of the house. I thought her friend was talking to her about her dog -and I was amazed because she showed no emotion about its death. - But what caught my attention was when she said to me without me asking: She was telling me about her husband, he died three days ago! When I expressed my surprise to her that she was speaking so casually three days after his death, her excuse was convincing and reasonable: He was sick, he had been ill for more than three months before his death!
My mind went back to a deeply impactful memory, which sparked a feeling in me years ago, a feeling that was not written with the title "Birds' Funeral". It was a scene of a group of chicks that we were raising in our house, standing around in silence, astonished and taken aback, surrounding one of them that had been sacrificed. It was a sensory surprise for everyone in the house, an unexpected shock from a bird that was advancing in the hierarchy like a chicken, and it was a shock that made us not dare to sacrifice another chick in front of the group of birds since then!
The sight of crows when one of them dies, a familiar sight witnessed by many, is a sight that is difficult to explain without feelings of sadness or a sense of connection! These crowds of crows, soaring high, cawing in various sounds and melodies, flying here and there, carrying the corpse of the dead crow and flying, all of this indicates the trembling of death in the bird world!
The sanctity of death is almost a natural feeling, it is not the primitive emotional feeling that is blurred in the American soul; but the dryness of life from emotional empathy, and basing it on materialistic equations, and on bodily relationships and motives, intentionally underestimating everything that people are known to consider sacred in the old world, and the urgent desire to contradict what people there have humbled themselves to, otherwise what is the advantage of the new world over the old world?
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Source: Al-Risala magazine, issue 959, 19/11/1951.
