Those, The New York Times reports, are the words of a Luo man interviewed during a march for peace in a Nairobi slum, a march attended by both Kikuyus and Luos. And that really is the message we should be sending to the young men and women killing each other across the country - not the baseless, emotion-charged arguments we continue to see on internet forums.

In the same story, The New York Times quotes a shopkeeper named Stanley Maina asking: "For all these years, we've been living together. Why are we fighting now?" That is the big question that neighbours must ask each other before they take to each others' throats in the most despicable acts of violence.

Kenyans need to realize that there is no difference between Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga. Both are extremely rich men who have done very little for their tribes-people, whether Kikuyus or Luos. We need to tell our people that Mwai Kibaki has more in common with Raila Odinga than he has with the slum-dwelling Kikuyu in Mathare struggling everyday to feed his family.

Raila Odinga feels and understands Kibaki's pain more than he understands the suffering of the poverty-stricken Luos languishing in the dungeons of Kibera, deep in his own constituency. This might come as shock to you, but if you looked at every single ethnic group in Kenya, you'd find that there are more Kikuyus living in poverty than the people of any other ethnicity. In a county where nearly half of the people are unemployed, you can guess that no ethnic group is going to be spared. In fact, the large a tribe is, odds are the more of its people are living in the most deprived conditions.

For example, in the United States, most of the people living in poverty, or exisiting at a great disadvantage are white people. That is so because they are the majority. But politicians do not want this known, so they instead play the race card, which ends up tricking these poor white people to vote against their own interests thinking all the while that they are acting against immigrants and Americans of other races. At the same time, their conditions keeps getting worse, as those they keep electing go on to serve other interests even as they keep taking this support for granted.

The exactly phenomenon is at work in Kenya. Politicians have told us that Kikuyus are in power, therefore, all Kikuyus are rich and that is the reason we are poor. They are taking what should be ours. Come on, Kenya, we are smarter than that.

Those of us with the luxury to share our views online must be careful not to exacerbate the situation. There are alternatives to violence and peace must prevail if we as a nation have to survive. If all our interests, the collective interest and the lot of the greater number is to improve.

What gives us human beings an edge over other creatures is our ability to learn by observation. I wish we could use this advantage more often. We do not have to plunge our country into mayhem to see what it means to be at war. We have seen what war has done to most of our neighboring countries and the burden it has placed on us.

If we lose our heads, we'll have nowhere to run and no one but ourselves to blame.