Ben Byerly’s Blog

In a post today, Tribalism is Not the Issue, Pastor M from Nairobi makes a point I have made several times to my Kenyan and American friends:

In the US for a couple of weeks… very interesting to hear the campaign rhetoric here and compare it with our own from a few months ago. And am struck by an amazing fact… Americans are just as tribalistic as we are! . . . sounds so familiar! I was struck by how much alike we all are … day-to-day decent, ordinary people, yet deep down driven by suspicion & ethnocentricity to self-protective stereotyping; ‘us verses them’.

. . . Enron and Arthur Andersen as well as Watergate and Irangate before that helped me understand that American’s are not closer to the God-side of the corruption scale than us; with our Goldenburg, Anglo Leasing and Francis Thuo (stock brokerage firm that recently went under after underhand dealings with investor funds).

If Americans are just as tribalistic, dirty and corrupt as we are, then why aren’t they grabbing ‘machetes’ and killing their neighbors, drowning in dirt and being labeled as corrupt? I think the answer is simple. The law here works.

Pastor M then offers a few solutions for Kenya. Read the whole brief post - Tribalism is Not the Issue

On further review, Pastor M might discover that the law in the US works better for some than others (e.g. DWB - Driving While Black to name just one). America’s brief history has it’s fair share of “wild west” living, sickening oppression of people (slavery and Native Americans), and a civil war too.