HISTORY YIELDS UP ITS DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

If you're among the millions who yearn to understand why our world is in such constant chaos, you have at least two routes of investigation. First, follow your passions (eg. Tea Partiers, conspiracy theorists, birthers, deathers, and assorted wingnuts). Second, follow the lessons of history (especially along the great fault lines of humanity).

Fault lines are usually understood to be those points of contact where contact between different forces is likely to trigger trouble. One blistering example often in the news is the great San Andreas fault line running dangerously down the spine of California. When the opposing tectonic plates beneath the earth grind against one another, trouble can emerges in cataclysmic quakes.

Now deploy this example throughout the planet...throughout the civilizations... throughout the races. Almost inevitably -- where and when these opposing forces collide -- troubles are likely to emerge. Either in the form of earthquakes and tsunamis....or civilizational feuds and wars....racial tensions and killings.

In some ways it's just that simple! And just that complicated!

* Where the planet's fault lines stir (eg. California, Iceland, the Mediterranean islands), troubles blot the pages of geological history. And while these lines can also create geological blessings like rich fuel and soil deposits, troubles are inevitable in the mix,

* Where the civilizations' fault lines stir (eg. ancient Persia and Greece, medieval Spain and the Islam, modern Jews and Arabs), troubles flare in human history. In these three and dozens of other cases, one civilization finds it unthinkable to co-exist with the other civilization, which it often takes to be, in today's parlance, the Great Satan.

* Where races' fault lines stir, neither the planet nor the civilizations necessarily tremble; but trouble nevertheless rumbles. To take one simple, bloody example, here in Chicago the fault lines can be drawn around our far west and far south communities where minorities like African Americans and Latinos cluster, bumping up against largely white communities to the east and northwest. Want a simple lesson? Read the weekend police blotter in the police stations near these fault lines.

So there it is -- a slightly pretentious but entirely practical lesson in how the fault lines of our world rarely cooperate, mostly collide. Why I can even find examples over family dinners where siblings bump into one another's opinions about life, love, and losing teams. It's never pretty...!