What About Our Coke Bottles

The film The Gods Must Be Crazy is one of the best examples of the mixing of cultures and how some people still live a very, very simple life and even the smallest thing, such as a Coke bottle, can through off their society.  The film maker does an excellent job of relating issues to all people, this is one of the main reasons the film has been such an international hit.  They use comedy to help describe somewhat touchy issues with a Coke bottle, something we can all relate to, as the catalyst.

I found it quite interesting how the civilized people, whom the bushman believed were gods, couldn't get anything right.  They were always messing up what seemed to be the simplest tasks.  The little bushman would laugh at them and how silly they were acting, even though it was normal behavior for civilized people.  However, when we look at who was really the civilized people in this film, was it really the so called "gods" or was it the bushmen.  The civilized people were running around killing one another, one of them was digging through elephant poop, others put the bushman in jail even though he couldn't understand the language being spoken, let alone the laws.  At the same time, in the middle of the Kalahari desert the bushmen tribes were living their lives without violence, without possessions, without money, and without shame.  It wasn't until something from the civilized world came into their world in the form of a Coke bottle, did the tribe start to lose it's sense of peace and community.

Is it possible that at one point all of us were as peaceful and gentle as the bushmen of the Kalahari?  I believe, that in a metaphorical sense and on a grander scale, the human race stumbled upon a Coke bottle some thousands of years ago.  However, instead of throwing it off the end of the earth, we used it, abused it, fought over it, and so on until the now present day human race has such a collection of Coke bottles of numerous sizes, there is no way we could ever throw them off the end of the earth.  Coke bottles could represent government, religion, possessions, guns, economies, and so on.  The question is, can we live with our Coke bottles, or will one day they have to be destroyed?