The concept of "distant-cousin-ness" stuck with me. When I was in church or at a stadium watching a football game or other place with a large audience, I used to think how cool it would be if the locale were plunged into darkness, and God were to first light-up all of my first cousins; then all second cousins; then all third cousins; then all fourth cousins; and so on.
Then it dawned on me that every living soul would eventually light up, because literally everybody is one's cousin.
As I came to understand that there were millions of people out there who did not ascribe to an evolutionist understanding of world history as we were raised to think in our family, who instead were committed to a literalist comprehension of the time line in Genesis 2 et seq., it dawned on me that that, irony of ironies, entailed an even closer relationship between people than the evolutionist perspective.
Why "irony of ironies"? Well, though no one has confirmed such to me by admission or by way of some kind of unimpeachable zillion dollar federal study, one gets that feeling from the whiteness of some white churches that the distinctness of the races is important to a lot of Christian fundamentalists. As one Christian fundamentalist lady said to me years ago when I worked at Jordan Kelsall's Unity-Frankford Grocery Store on Penn Street at Sanger Street in Frankford, "Look at their ears! Look at their noses! Look at their lips! Those blacks are monkeys!" I gently responded, "Aren't our [meaning 'whites' '] lips actually closer to those of a monkey? Blacks are more evolved!" [I was just a kid at the time, so I didn't put up a bigger fight.] She gave me a dirty look and stomped out of the store.
I thought it was so interesting, a year-or-so ago, when my Ancestry-com DNA sample verified that one or more of my family's slave owning ancestors on my mother's side had begotten offspring by one or more African Americans, almost certainly as part of the widely-accepted culture, in the pre-emancipation South, of concubinage of female slaves. The implication of the results obtained, so far, is that as a consequence several hundred to several thousand blacks in the United States are distant cousins of my white family.
I would have loved to have had DNA verification of that silly fundamentalist woman's relationship to blacks -- and I would have loved to have been there when the evidence was shown to her. I would have said, "Hey! Guess who's comin' to dinner!"
For me, the importance of the DNA connection was that it drove home how much we are all members of the Family of Man -- from the blondest blue-eyed SS stormtrooper to the blackest, most effeminate gay Australian aborigine. We are all cousins.
That would be a very cool photo: A grim-looking fully-uniformed blonde-haired blue-eyed Nazi stormtrooper holding hands with a short, very fat aborigine woman with a really big Afro. The caption would read, "Not such distant cousins."
In law school, I was immensely delighted to see that one of my textbooks on Wills and Estates contained The Lawyer's Table on Consanguinity, the chart showing things like what a "third cousin, once removed" is ...
Suddenly, I understood the system assigning a descriptive title to each of my distant cousins -- every human being ! [Perhaps the most distant cousin would be something like my "14,354th cousin, 117 times removed."]
The "bottom line," here? Literally, ever thermonuclear MIRV atop every ICBM awaiting launch in every silo in the world is aimed at cousins, only!
And when Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan did this to Bibi Aisha ...
When Nazis rammed as many screaming Jews as possible into fake showers to gas them all with Zyklon B ...
... they were ramming their cousins into those showers.
Be nice to your cousins -- the Muslims, the Jews, the blacks, the gays, the Asians, the Latinos, and so on. All of them !
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