Notes from the Ionosphere: Tinted Skin

Someone looking down on Earth from on high may find some of our behavior to be peculiar if not downright silly.

If someone turns his back on his parents then he's considered ungrateful. If he turns his back on his grandparents then he's considered disloyal, but if he turns his back on every ancestor he's ever had then he's considered utterly soulless.

Every single person who is alive today comes from African stock. Sure it may have been years ago, but only a heathen would deny his roots to the family of Man.

So why fight with family? Is it merely sibling rivalry? Do we all just want to impress Mom and Dad? Don't you know that skin color is meant to help and not hurt? The more you live in the sun, referred to as "Sol" and not without irony, the darker your skin will get. It's a protective feature like tinted sunglasses and the less you live in the sun the lighter your skin will become. That's just basic biology.

The sun is the source of all life on Earth from colorful plants to ferocious animals. We all started in bright, sunny, abundant Africa and so needed the extra sun block, but even then it wasn't automatic. Some people were born slightly lighter. Did that start a rift even then? Did they try to find shade in the North where there were more cloudy days? Were they the first nomads and did they resent their exile from the "Sol" of Man?

Nowadays people are separated for all sorts of new reasons. There are rivalries between landmasses, between mountain ranges and rivers and even from house to house, room to room and bed to bed. Do we all just love a good squabble so very much?

In America, the so-called "New World," which was neither new nor a whole world, there was even a term to help identify people of varying shades. It was called the "one-drop rule" and it stated that if you had so much as one drop of sub-Saharan African blood then you were by definition black no matter what your skin looked like. This, not surprisingly, is in direct contrast to the rule of Africa that considers anyone not entirely sub-Saharan to be brown and not black at all. We can't even get our own rules of discrimination right! No wonder we fight so much.