Who are "We"? And what do "We" want?

You hear it time and again in quotes from people in the news. We want this, we want that, we want what's ours, we want what's good and right for everyone, what's good and right for "We".

The American Declaration of Independence starts with "We the people".

Lately I've noticed that sometimes people play fast and loose with "We". Sometimes it's intentional, sometimes not. Sometimes people really believe that everyone thinks as they do, so they use We to refer to everyone. Sometimes there is a specific agenda and they use We to imply that everyone supports this idea/program/concept/whatever, or at least they should.

Sometimes We is used to refer to a specific group, and that's fine. It's when it they are referring to some nebulous, overarching group of everyone that gets my attention.

What do We want? On one hand We say that we should care for the sick and injured, give aid and comfort to the less fortunate, especially children. On the other hand, when these children grow up without any education or training or civilizing and go out into the world and start making trouble, we have no compunction about killing them. Okay, maybe We have some compunction, but we do it anyway.

Near as I can tell, killing other people, especially people from another tribe (a different group of We), has been the number one sport since people first showed up on this planet. Nowadays, it seems that slaughter is "senseless", but killing killers, especially killers from another tribe, is okay.

Daring daughter just got back from three months in Africa. She visited Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zanzibar. Kenya, the bastion of civilization on the East Coast is now off-limits. Uganda, site of innumerable horrors 20 or 30 years ago is now considered mostly safe.

She only spent a couple of days in Rwanda, site of recent genocide (Hutus killing Tutsis, or vice versa, I don't remember which), and she described it as bizarre. They visited the capital, a large modern city, with large, American size prices. How can this be? Everything seemed way too normal. But there were undercurrents of hate and repressed loathing. I suspect if she had been there much longer it would have become more apparent.