Just Fruit

I was watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding again last night (I know it’s positively unbecoming to be so bored a week before my exams), and it had me thinking of something extraordinarily basic. It was summed up by the father of the bride towards the end, when he said the roots of one family’s name was derived from the Greek word for orange, and the other’s from apple. “So we have Apples & Oranges”, he said, “We’re all different, but in the end we’re all fruit.” I may be inexact with the words here, but you get the message.

The idea is pre-Mesozoic as far as intellectual memory goes. It isn’t something new. As a species, we have theorized about it, tried to build structures around it, eaten it, chewed it, swallowed it, and spit it out. What we haven’t been able to do, is digest it.

To some extent, the argument holds that people who exploit differences do so for vested interest and wage violence in the name of identity for the sake of power. But what about those so willing to be led? What, in other words, about us, who are so simply fed that differences somehow deny humanity itself to other groups and cultures?

If the idea was really so basic to human conscience, and so obvious that I didn’t really have to write about it, then why am I so full of instances of its flouting? States and federal units where leaders find it offending that someone should prioritize their national identity. People who throw stones at other people just because they stand a little differently when in the house of God, or because they speak another language to their divinity. Groups that can’t touch or eat with other groups of human beings because they were born in different families. Sexes that treat other sexes with disrespect because of a slight biological variation. People who measure another’s worth in bank accounts and poverty lines.

What if you didn’t know? Here’s an exercise in visualization, and my purely linguistic twist on the Rawlsian idea of justice. What if you only saw the person behind the curtain, the veil of ignorance, and didn’t see the curtain? What if you were blind to the colour of their skin, deaf to their accent, ignorant of their past? What if you judged people the same way you wanted to be judged? Not on the basis of how many terrorists are from your culture or what shades of pink are sold to your gender or what profession your community has practised for generations. Purely on the basis of who you are.

The idea of the unique individual is identical to this unencumbered universal humanity.

I’ve fallen from a grape vine, but I think like a mango, I feel like a guava, I look like a melon and I might just fall in love with a pomegranate. And you’re just as messy as I am.

So here’s the deal.

Forget the colours and orchards and smells.

And let’s all be fruit.