Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Asian American Pacific Islander Month




I'm Asian from Near East, now in Afghanistan
What is an Asian? Asia is a big place with at least four very different regions: South Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, and North Asia. These territories are so large with populations that are so massive, it is likely that most people on the planet today are Asian. Even the Native Americans, and therefore the Mexicans and Central and South Americans, might have Asian roots. This depends on whether one buys the theory that Siberians (North Asians) crossed the Bering Straits over a temporary land bridge that once existed. No doubt someone crossed over, but there's plenty of doubt if that's how all or most Indigenous people arrived that way. Much more likely are repeated waves of arrivals for millennia. People have been in the New World for more than 50,000 years according to Graham Hancock. And they were originally very dark-skinned Australian aborigines.

Of course, Pacific Islanders have been coming and going for even longer. There's an island where kava kava grows called Vanuatu. It's way out in the South Pacific. Using canoes there was a group who navigated from there to Easter Island to Guam and the 1,000 islands, islets, and atolls that comprise the massive state of Hawaii. We hear about four islands, but there are at least 996 more. Look at a detailed map. Most of them are off-limits and used for war. At least one is covered by a veil, cloaking it from the rest of the planet. A pilot who stumbled upon it and lived there during his absence after crash landing in the open ocean, wrote about it. A movie was supposed to come out about it, with its active volcano, strange, isolated culture, which aware of the outside world and wanting nothing to do with it, a princess, and a planned human sacrifice to appease the "god" of that volcano. We waited after his appearance on Coast to Coast and, thanks George, you disappointed us again. Formerly Buddhist Afghanistan, the birthplace of the Buddha (yes, not Nepal and not India, but an ancient place named Gandhara around the Indus Valley Civilization).

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