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"Your Washington friend is right," whispered Ushi to Sylvia in the limousine. "You are married to one of the most wonderful persons one can have as a friend, someone with a rare openness to love and to life."
"I've always known that," replied Sylvia.
When I overheard them, I felt so small for having doubted Sylvia. I had never allowed myself to fully experience her trust.
We said good-bye to Ushi in the hotel lobby and went upstairs to freshen up where we talked on the balcony, interrupted now and then by a show of lightning and crashing thunder. The air smelled clean and sweet afterwards, but quickly became hot and sticky again.
I had ordered sandwiches and coffee as we came in, something to munch on while we talked.
"Why this sudden interest in women?" Sylvia asked out of the blue while we ate. Her face became blank and hard, as if torn by emotions. I was shocked. I had never seen her that way before.
I shrugged my shoulders. "I don't really know what started all this. I suppose it comes from being honest with oneself, and with one's feeling about the beauty of life in all its forms."
"And the answer to this lies with women?"
I shook my head. "It isn't as simple as that, Sylvia. It goes much deeper. Are we not all human beings? Why should it be a crime for one person to treat another person primarily as a human being? Why should this not be possible for a man when the other person is a woman? Why should it be a crime for a man to have a warm feeling for another person that also happens to be a woman."
"You know the reason, Peter," Sylvia replied sharply.
"No, I am serious, Sylvia. We are primarily human beings. Everything else is secondary, even the divisions we have created. Why can't we take off our sexual jarmulka that we all wear, which denies our universal humanity that unites us all as human beings? Why must we live sexually isolated, like we were hiding behind the Islamic hijab or the burka? We feel great compassion for the women who are forced to live under the burka, even for the men that impose it. We feel compassion, because we see these people as victims of a kind of religious fundamentalism that makes so sense to us. Why then are we riding the same train? We live with the same burka between us as human beings, sexually divided and isolated, with reflections in countless different ways. We are riding a train on which we murdered politically, facing nuclear war militarily, and the collapse of civilization financially and economically, and all that while the return of the Ice Age is on the horizon. Don't you think it is time to get off this train? It's time, Sylvia, to lay the burka aside and discover us as human beings? It's like a wise man once said: The world is full of beautiful things, and beautiful people, too. Yes Sylvia, half of them are women. Why do we force ourselves to live with closed eyes and closed hearts to one-another? It is not a myth that the wondrous nature of humanity comes to light in both men and women in a rich profusion. Humanity exists to be cherished, because love exists. That's from a poem that hung on a wall in Russia. The poet is right. That's how it is. So tell me, Sylvia, why should the female species of humanity be excluded from that?"
"That's not what the issue is between us, Peter. The issue is your womanizing!" Sylvia interrupted.
"No, the issue is universal division and the culturally forced self-isolation of people from one-another and from our common humanity. That's the underlying issue, Sylvia. The whole world is suffering because of this issue. You don't seem to realize how critical our situation has become. The Ice Age is upon us. We are in an Ice Age world right now, even though the climate transition to the deep freeze won't happen for an another years. We are in it now, because it will take a hundred years to develop the technologies and to create the infrastructure that we need to support the world-population with indoor agriculture when much of the normal agriculture becomes disabled by the Ice Age climate."
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