Wisdom from the Street

Experts have their place, of course.  I used to be one, a professor, and so I know a good deal about them, about all sorts of experts.  Indeed, I was once a professor of geography and so one might think I would know my way around the world that I would understand how it works.  That would be a mistake.  From time to time I do get some insights into such things, and sometimes from experts, but not always.  Sometimes these insights come from what would seem unexpected sources.  Take, for example, my dentist, who is from Bulgaria.  Sometimes, when she has my mouth incapacitated and helpless to protest, she lectures me on how the Balkans work.  She is an expert in dentistry, but to my knowledge not trained in any way in any field having to do with political geography.  And yet she nailed it.  In very simple form, where most significant wisdom resides, not in incomprehensible complexity but in quite simple paradigms.  It has to do with tribes, she says, with small tribes of people who hate one another and have done so for millennia, and for very good reasons, like what the other tribe did to grandmother.  Once she had put her finger on it, I then recalled all the rest of it, the various horrors of Balkan history, which now I understood as never before.   All this from my dentist, by no means an expert but who knows the country and its people.  Enough so to get out the first chance she had to do so.  And join the rest of us in Southern California.

And so here we sit, people from everywhere, breathing free and enjoying the good life.  This is a place to which people from everywhere gravitate, and so it is a good place to listen to people, not just the experts, but people who know things because they have been there, because they grew up in all those other nasty places.  Why, just this week I found out why Syria is such a mess, I mean really found out, not the stuff you see on the news, not the stuff we all know or think we know, but the real stuff, the driving force behind it all.  I got it from my cardiologist, who was born in Lebanon.  Again very simple stuff and much like the wisdom of my dentist, also about tribes.  It is Bashir al-Assad’s tribe, the Alawites, who are at the root of it, the Alawites, and all the rest of the Syria’s tribes.  It is tribal warfare and ugly as all tribal warfare is.  According to my cardiologist, an Armenian, Assad cannot let go of power.  If he does, he knows that not only will he be slaughtered so too will all of his tribe, a minority who have imposed their will on the other tribes for decades.  And done so quite brutally.  They have nowhere to go.  And if they fall, the people they have tormented for so long will do horrible things to them, both for revenge and for the fun of it.   So now I have the key to it, and with that key all the rest of it comes together.   All this from someone whose expertise lies elsewhere.  Speaking of which, my heart, by the way is fine.

This, incidentally, accounts for the Assad’s foreign support, from countries where one tribe dominates all the rest, where should those other tribes gain power, the tribe now with power would suffer terribly, as always happens in tribal societies.  Both for revenge and for the fun of it.  It is never pretty. 

California is hugely rich, not from its resources, but from the people who gravitate here.  Yesterday I sold one of my motorcycles to two lads from Czech Republic, who were just passing through, having just arrived from New Zealand and about to depart for Tierra del Fuego.  Although well traveled, with recent returns to Europe, neither had before been in the States.  And they were hugely impressed, not by the usual stuff, but by the people.  In all of their travels they had never before encountered people who were so polite and so nice to them.  But that is another story, why America is what it is and so different from everyplace else.  What I wanted from these lads was their take on what is happening in Europe.  And they kindly provided it.  First of all, they feel they cannot go back, that Europe is history.  These are sharp young men, by the way, and keen observers.  For reasons I will not bore you with here, neither of these young Czechs saw any hope for Europe.  In their view it was too far gone to recover, that gravity was against it, that from now on it would just be a continuous and painful slide into the abyss.   That was the simple point they made, and from it, I thought of all the reasons they were right.  And, as I did with Syria, shuddered at those thoughts, at the root of each being these simple observations and conclusions drawn by people looking at things not from ivory towers nor seats of power but from the streets they know all too well.    

Karl E. Francis, Ph.D.