Stranger in the Ray

PROBE

Stranger in the Ray

Dr. Albert E. Burke

1962

An invisible ray goes with that nuclear explosion. (film: sun activity) It's too small to be seen — only 2967 angstroms — and it's deadly. From that explosion, it shoots out into space in all directions. A few of them head for the earth. That ray doesn't travel alone. It's one of an even 1000 invisible rays like it that have been produced steadily for billions of years by this star. If you were to be standing on the earth's surface where they hit the earth's surface hardest — and you were not one of the millions of human beings on this planet who are protected from that radiation from this place by this chemical in your skin — then you would be in for a rough time. It could be a deadly serious time .... because that chemical catches those invisible rays (they're ultraviolet rays from the sun) and changes them to heat which the body then tosses off. If those rays are not caught and tossed off that way, then the skin burns; it can be simple sunburn, it can be heat stroke. Those rays can kill anyone not favored by nature with this stuff in their bodies ... not favored by enough of it, that is. That means most of the human race . . . most of you out there. And in that fact is a story — easily the most important story of all those we've probed in these sessions so far; a story that begins with invisible rays from the sun that have made you, and others around you, what they are. That story we probe now in the "Stranger In The Ray."

This is a very special place. (film: Arctic) Not because it became the first line of defense in war for every nation that fronts on it — it's a very special place because it gets quite a bit of light from the sun, but little heat or ultraviolet radiation. It takes a special kind of person to live and work and survive in that kind of place ... and the Americans and Canadians who built these radar posts weren't that kind. These people were (picture: Eskimo) Given the same clothes, equipment and training they outworked and outlasted Americans and Canadians every time. Why this difference for the Eskimos? At one of our aeromedical laboratories up above the Arctic, Circle one of our doctors thought he'd found the answer one day when he put an Eskimo through a complete physical examination. What he discovered for that Eskimo started an experiment that touches on one of the touchiest, most misunderstood, costly and dangerous problems on this planet this minute ... the problem of race; the differences that exist (or are supposed to exist) to make one group of human beings unlike others, better than others or inferior to others — as quite a few people think about race today.

As we thought about it in that medical station when that doctor dis-covered that Eskimos put out quite a bit more body heat than either Americans or Canadians. Obviously, with more body heat, the Eskimo should stand the Arctic cold better. And just as obviously, those men decided, this was simply a matter of race. The Eskimo was simply a different kind of human being — his body worked differently. And it was a perfectly good answer until another doctor there decided to test it because he didn't believe that human beings were different that way. He wondered what would happen if a group of Eskimos were to change places for a time with a group of American servicemen. And each were to live for that time, as the other did, wearing the others clothes, eating the others food. The results wrecked the perfectly good answer about Eskimos as different kinds of human beings. When they stopped eating walrus meat and fish and substituted scrambled eggs and hamburgers, their output of body heat dropped to what it had been for you and me. When those American servicemen finished several days on that diet of walrus meat, fish and berries, their output of body heat went up to what it was for the Eskimo. That difference was not a racial difference, because the human race isn't different that way.

It is different this way. This little book is really a book about race, except that the automobile salesman who use it to tell you what different kinds of cars are worth year by year hardly think about it that way. Cars are listed in this little blue book by make and model and year. One group of cars that look alike, came from the same place, and have other things in common — are listed together. Another group of cars that look alike, came from another place and have other things in common are listed together too. That's all there is to the matter of race — among human beings. Groups of people who look alike, come from the same place and have other things in common are listed together as races. But that listing has nothing to do with brain power and very little to do with muscle power — as is quite clear for the Eskimo — because he belongs to the same racial group as the men who, back in the 1200's, moved into the greatest empire the world has known to this day. (film: Genghis Kahn) They carried with them ideas of government, economics and ways of doing things that were every bit as advanced as any civilization an earth then .. . ideas from people like them who had set up one of the first civilizations on earth in China. And those people all came originally from this place in northeast Asia, it's believed. This was the home of the Mongoloid peoples — one of the three main racial groups. They spread from here across China into southeast Asia and Japan. They reached as far west as central Asia and are believed to have come into the Americas as the earliest Indians. But it was this place that left its mark on the Mongol peoples; in what they looked like to this day. Whatever those people may have looked like originally in this cold place, only those who had any body fat under the skin and over the eyes, as protection against the cold, survived here. The rest died off in this place of little heat and little ultra-violet radiation. It's that radiation from the sun that is the key to under-standing much of what is race in the world today.

This is quite clear in what is believed to be the home area of the people who have been most directly affected by the sun's radiation (film: tropical jungle) particularly the heat and ultraviolet parts of it. That part of Africa below there is the world's greatest concentration point for ultra-violet radiation and one of its hottest places near the Equator in west Africa. The people here were to be marked by this place where there was no heat for protection against cold but against heat and heavy ultraviolet rays. Protection against both were in that chemical — pigment in the skin called melanin. That chemical absorbs those rays before they can reach the sensitive layers of skin and converts them into radiant heat which is then tossed off as body heat. Those people in that west African homeland of the Negro who had that pigment in their skin survived ... the rest died off. And it's that chemical that gives the Negro a dark skin making the Negro as much better suited to the hot country than white skinned Americans or Europeans — as the Eskimo is better suited to the cold country than those people ... who, with white skins, have a homeland somewhere between Mongols and Negros in the belt of cool climates that runs through the west center of this Eurasian land mass — covering North Africa, Europe and Western Asia. In that middle place white-skinned people were not troubled by too much heat or cold though they had to deal with heavy doses of ultraviolet radiation during the summer. Not too long ago, this third main racial group showed less body fats than Mongols but more than was found in Negroes, to deal with cloudy and occasionally cold winters. A white skin, with little melanin, was best in winter for irradiating sunlight to produce vitamin D when it was most needed. But that same skin can deal with occasionally strong summer ultraviolet radiation by suntanning when necessary to get some of the same protection from that radiation which Negroes have.

Now the point in all this — covering only three main racial groups (there are others) — and only a few things each has in common ... the point is to make clear that race was once a very necessary thing in human history before man began to control the effect of heat, light and ultraviolet radiation in different places. Race, the special characteristics worked out over long periods of time by Mongols, Negroes and white Caucasians, race made possible the spread of the human race to all livable places on earth. From those places came the plant and animal foods we all eat today and the inventions we all share today. But it was a single species of man that did this — that adjusted to and survived in all those places. It's a remark-able story about a remarkable living thing. No other living thing on this planet got around as widely as man — except the ant. It's a remarkable story but it's way out of date. Because all of it was worked out long before today's steam-heated, air-conditioned, labor-saving way of doing things, which makes it possible for anyone to live and survive just about anyplace. Today the old racial categories of human beings are meaningless ... because the only real purpose race had in human history is finished —except for those who see, in this way of listing people a weapon to be used for very different purposes than God intended: those who still see "strangers in the ray" as we will see in a moment.

I have here an old travel book printed back in the 1880's in Boston. This one tells the story of a "round the world trip" made by a traveler from that city. At one point in it he makes a terribly important statement that hits close to the heart of the race problem as it really troubles the whole world this minute: this simple little statement, quote. "We stopped in Shanghai for a few hours on the 27th of August and noticed that all the natives are very immoral." What this man meant was that in that strange far off place strange people did strange, unfamiliar things — dressed and behaved in strange and unfamiliar ways. And his reaction was as old as human history. The unfamiliar, as he saw it, was wrong. That reaction has spelled out more human misery throughout the whole of human history than any other single thing ... because no human being any place on earth, in this far off Chinese place then or across the tracks in the wrong end of town now, no group of human beings does anything without reason —understandable reason.

The trouble is understanding anything is still the same hard work it has always been. And it's easier to simply decide that the things that are familiar are right, while the things that are unfamiliar are wrong. That's all there is to the difference between right and wrong for most of the human race — for most of us, now: not morals, not ethics, not religious teachings or principle. The familiar, the way we do things, is right. The unfamiliar, the way others do things, is wrong.

Take Kikik (picture: Eskimo woman) for example. What she did one day early in 1958 was wrong. What she did, as Canadians heard about it then, was smile. As Canadians talked about it then, that smile by that Eskimo was simply proof of how uncivilized that race really was. Imagine smiling when she was on trial for murder! On April 16, 1958, Kikik (Eskimo) went on trial for her life before the Territorial Court of the Northwest Territories of Canada . . . and it's true, she smiled. Behind that smile was a story that began several weeks earlier in this place with the start of a winter storm out of the north. (film: dog sled) It was just another winter blizzard but it passed over a place with a very special problem . . . a place in which several Eskimo families were starving to death because in this land there was no food anymore. One of those families was the family of Kikik — and before that storm was over Kikik was to become a murderess to be brought to justice when she left that place by sled for what she hoped would be help. What Kikik got instead was called justice.

What happened to Kikik began before she was born, when in places like New York, San Francisco, Paris, London and Berlin, women decided that the white fox was just the right trimming to go with evening dresses and coats. It has always been right among Americans, Frenchmen, Britishers and Germans for such demands to be met by searching out a supply and that supply was in Canada in the land of Kikik's people. This was back in the early 1920's when few of Kikik's people had guns and hunted instead with knives, spears and bows and arrows. They couldn't kill many foxes that way or too many of the deer either — which was their main supply of food and skins for clothes.

Kikik's people lived off the deer. They were known as the people of the deer. Because women all over the civilized world could not dress without white fox in those early years, a trading post was opened in the land of Kikik's people and they were offered all the guns and ammunition they wanted in return for all the white fox skins they could bring in. The Canadian trappers who came in slaughtered the deer by the thousands leaving their dead bodies around as bait for the foxes. The Eskimos could now kill all the deer they wanted — no more bow and arrow stuff. And all went well for a few years until two things happened. One was that women's fashions changed in New York, San Francisco, Paris and London. White fox was no longer in demand. And with that, the trading post closed down. Suddenly there was no more ammunition for the guns the Eskimo had been given to hunt with. And when they tried to go back to the old way of hunting the Eskimo discovered there weren't many deer left either. So many had been killed off, along with the fox. The cost of those white foxes on the shoulders of the worlds civilized women wasn't just the dollars, pounds, francs or marks they paid in fashionable stores for them. The cost was lives — thousands of Eskimo lives dead of starvation over the years, from those years of high fashion in the early 1900's to those starving Eskimo families in Kikik's place in 1958.

At one point during that storm that passed over Kikik's place in 1958 the husband of the family next door went mad with hunger and killed Kikik's husband. He then came into Kikik's place and tried to kill her five children. She killed him instead and then, alone, started by sled for help putting her two youngest ones on the sled almost naked because they had eaten their clothes. She traveled that way alone with five children and no food for several days until she met another Eskimo family without a sled and starving too. The man of that family asked Kikik to let him take the sled because that way he could reach help at a trading post not too far off. He would then send help back for Kikik. She agreed and settled back in a hole scooped out of the snow to wait. She waited five days but no help came. On the sixth day she knew she couldn't wait anymore.

They had not eaten anything for seven days. They would die if they didn't move. So she made a toboggan out of a piece of canvas. With one child strapped to her back, two walking beside her, and pulling two on the canvas toboggan she started out. And by the end of that day she knew that they could not make it — not all of them. If any of her children were to be saved the most helpless would have to be left behind. Put yourself in Kikik's place. How does any mother decide which of her children shall live... and which shall die?

The two youngest were put into a hole scooped out of the snow and covered with the canvas toboggan. Then with the remaining three children Kikik headed for that trading post. She got as far as an abandoned trappers cabin. There she waited to die. But she didn't because the Eskimo who had taken her sled had gotten through and had sent back help. But that help had gone back to Kikik's place where she had killed a man. And when a search party found Kikik in that trappers cabin, she was a wanted woman — wanted for murder. When that search party learned that Kikik had deliberately left two of her children behind to die the charge was doubled against her. A policeman left the day after Kikik was found to pick up the bodies of those two children as evidence. And by some miracle, one was found still alive.

On April 16 in the 1958th year of civilized men, an Eskimo named Kikik smiled through her trial for murder. That smile proving to civilized Canadians just how basically savage and unfeeling the Eskimo was as a race. Kikik's smile, you see, was unfamiliar. Therefore it was wrong. Kikik smiled because, among her people, it was impolite to cause others to be unhappy. She smiled through that trial for her life because she was trying — the only way she knew — to keep those civilized people in that courtroom from being unhappy because of what she had done.

Kikik smiled until the judge pronounced his verdict. Kikik's life was saved by that judge who knew why Kikik smiled and knew the Eskimo. "Not guilty," he said. Kikik smiled until someone translated what he said into her language, because she hadn't understood a word of what went on at that trial. "Kikik," he said in her language, "listen. It is all finished now. It is all done." Then Kikik didn't have to smile anymore.

Except for those who are mentally sick in their ideas about other people and their attitudes toward them the real reason for the inhumanity men have practiced against other men is ignorance and dislike — even fear of the unfamiliar. But the unfamiliar among human beings has very little to do with race ... has very much to do with what geography and history have done to people. People who live in deserts can't think or act or live as people do in tropical jungles or the frozen arctic ... unless they have the science and technology to wipe out those differences. We have the science and the technology to do that now, and any human being — what-ever the shade of his skin, bone, nose, eye socket, or chin, or the color of his skin — whatever way any human being is listed as belonging to some race — any human being can use that science and technology today. There is no race of superior thinkers or doers. Today's superior peoples were yesterday's inferior ones.

Which brings us to this place (film: Saudia Arabian soldiers) where early in 1963 a people who only a few hundred years ago were the superior civilization of that time made clear after a revolt in Iraq that they wanted to see a United Arab bloc. Whether that Union of Arab states comes about as a result of that revolt, or not — it will happen one day. And that Union will have as one of its goals — putting an end to the very unfamiliar place called Israel ... unfamiliar in the way it does things — and for that reason alone, wrong.

At that point, the world faces a showdown — because the Israelis are in the Middle East today because most of those people had nowhere to go . . . as the target of the worst inhumanity dealt any group of human beings in history. They came to the Middle East — and Europeans, unable to solve what they called that "racial" problem in their own countries, were happy to have that problem unloaded in the Middle East.

Today, the Israelis still have nowhere else to go but they do have a nuclear reactor, they do have the stuff of atomic bombs, and they do have missiles — as well as a great deal of top flight scientific minds and technological know-how. Faced by a United Arab threat to their survival, their backs are to the wall. At that point, the price of fear or dislike for the unfamiliar . . . of hate or contempt for men because they are racially different ... at that point, we face a showdown. Because the Israelis will use atom bombs to survive — as any other people will. In those bombs is the same radiation that . . . from the sun, divided men into races. What began in radiation, can end in radiation. What price ignorance, hate and fear?