This book has enlightened me a great deal. I have been reading it when there was the refugee "crisis" and refugee reception crisis. Have been reading it when I have been unemployed for almost ten months. And it makes me think about what my late mother said when I was born, as was the third one and the latest (long years between my older brother and sister): "the world is large, she should live, too". People thought she was brave, in fact, she thought larger than life. Well, this is not an article about having kids but it is about what lives mean for us, what others' lives mean for us and what life could mean if we thought it a bit differently, if we were a bit open-minded and open-hearted.
There are many themes in this book amongst which he also talks about migration and how some people are seen as "human waste" by the countries that would not want to receive them. How it is possible to think of others' lives less valuable than ours when taking it as a difference that we are here and they are there, and we ask ourselves "why do they come here?". However, we have to think more deeply, more without borders in our heads, as Greta was saying, this is the world we are living in. Territories are just a piece of it. The small parts make a multitude and we make a multitude. What does this all mean? It means that if we have thought like my mother, we would have said: "the world is big enough, let people live". Now I can hear some conservative people saying, "well, not on my territory", then we should talk about other themes such as being universal, being forgiving, being giving, being open, being non-prejudiced, being sharing, being against the wind and against the adversities of life.
Unfortunately, I hear more and more exclusion oriented remarks about migrants and refugees. It is not weird to hear these, it would be weird to get used to these remarks. Let us think this way: the world is large enough, people can go wherever they want, borders are men made and we need to justify every wrong we make cause otherwise we will seem weak. Nobody wants to seem weak, so every day there is a fight for modernity, for jobs, for salaries, for staying alive, no solidarity in the workplace, there is a thin line between a warm welcome and a cold indifference as Bauman says in this book, everything and everyone is discardable. Nobody is grateful. The institutions that are public are even becoming like the private ones, where you have to prove yourself every day, fifty per cent of the workers in the USA are using anti-depressants. The psychologists are telling us how to deal with anger, pain and sadness. They are telling us how to deal with our past. It is sad in fact, there is no confidence between people, our credits that we give to people are falling or increasing every day. Past does not count, continuous production does and you know what you should act as if you are permanent even if you are on a precarious contract. They want your total loyalty while they cannot promise you anything. What happens then, you are unemployed or you go bankrupt, then you are not a good consumer anymore. You are not what the system wants you to be so you are ready to be discarded. This is a part of what Bauman talks about.
So how do I tie this dilemma to the issue of refugees, in a system where you do not trust your government, your state, your union, your municipality, your friends, your family, your surroundings and you feel abandoned, or maybe you are not so much abandoned it is only your family that is supporting you, then of course you will not trust "strangers", psychologically you are living in a very hostile world and this hostile world is pushing you to the limits of insanity. You are becoming less and less trustful and less and less trustworthy every day, you are questioned for your capabilities every day. And they are teaching robots how to have social connections, whilst we are devoid of good social connections and social relations. Sad but true. This is the economic, social and cultural crisis and people just start to trust what they know (that is even doubtful) but then the thing that you do not know scares you really more than it should.
We were all aliens and strangers when we came to the world, but somebody said: "let her or him live". And then we became a part of this world and life. We are strangers to this life, it is borrowed and it will be given away. Nothing will be permanent, even our memories can be erased and our books can be burned one day. For a life that is borrowed, who are we to decide to lend life to others, to give life to others? Would that be possible to decide on your own?
To live like a tree, single and free,
To live like a forest, in brotherhood.
Nazim Hikmet
This should be our promise to this world. And if we are fire made out of the trees, it means that we cannot be cruel to our origins. We cannot be cruel to who we do not know. Cause everyone in life deserves a chance, deserves hope and deserves to dream of a "better future" (I also would like to discuss in another blog, what I think of a better future concept). The cause of our frustration is not strangers. It is the system we are living in, that is treating us as waste, and the only way to get out of this thought process is to think of others as waste which produces hostile ideas about the world and so-called "others". We should be aware of these dilemmas and controversies of our daily lives and think twice.
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