"One Tribe"

The Black Eyed Peas are known for their very upbeat and easy-to-dance-to songs. Most people, myself included, have seen the new Pepsi commercial about Pepsi funding meaningful/charity projects. That is where I heard a tiny little excerpt of the song, "One Tribe." Since I did not pay too much attention to the lyrics, all I thought of the song was that it was very catchy.

I did not get a chance to see the lyrics to "One Tribe" until I went CPYC, a church camp that takes place in Pleasantville, this month. One day, the lesson everyone learned was to not judge people by appearances, but instead on the good we see within them, so we listened to "One Tribe" in our "small group" that day and really payed attention to the lyrics. The song was obviously fitting to the lesson with lyrics like "Don't care where you are / Don't care where you been / 'Cause where we gonna go / Is where we wanna be." Where people are and where people have been represents the not-so-good exterior others see, while where people want to go represents the beautiful interior everyone has somewhere within them that people should see.

Church camp aside, I listened to the song again and listened to the lyric "Let's cast amnesia / Forget about all that evil .... that evil that they feed you." Sure, I heard the lyric, but it really made me think. Who teaches us our prejudices and grudges? Our family? Our friends? Our teachers? The media? The truth is all of them are "feeding us that evil." They feed us racism, sexism, stereotyping, and profiling. Think about it, a lot of the unfortunate events in the world sources from that evil. The only possible way it could stop is if we erased our memory of the evil that the world pours into our head.

Would it not be great if we could just forget about everything that happened in the past and our differences and come together as one tribe?

Through the Eyes of a Pig

What do people see when they look at this photo? Obviously, most would recognize a close and warm bond between a mother pig and her piglet, and that is exactly what I recognized when I first looked at the picture, but then I took a much closer look into the picture. Disregarding the feel-good caption below the photo, I saw fear and sorrow in the piglet's eye. The piglet has a very personified facial expression in which it looks as if it will burst into tears.

One may ask, "What is the piglet so afraid of?" Take a look at where the piglet is sitting- a feeding trough. This darkly foreshadows the feeble and miserable piglet's horrendous fate as a part of someone's meal and the gruesome slaughter it will have to face beforehand. The mother has a quite peculiar facial expression. She knows from previous experiences exactly what her piglet fears and knows that her young one has every right to be worried, yet still attempts to assuage and comfort it. This piglet will be one of the many piglets people had severed from the mother's care then killed. Imagine how heartbroken and hopeless one would be if every single one of their children were brutally murdered. That is the level of pain this mother pig constantly feels and she will always feel that very agony until she cannot produce anymore young (at that point, she would be slaughtered) or until she dies.

Some peoples do not have compassion for animals because they like to think that animals cannot feel as humans feel, but whether someone looks at this photo and sees a mother loving her child or sees a piglet and its mother in fear, he or she will clearly detect an emotion that some people will never know of.