My country, or the story of a woman

Welcome to Denmark. This is a country where we have alot of strange practices. One of these is the practice of keeping fellow human beings, that have come seeking shelter from the calamities of torture and persecution, locked up inside institutions that we have somehow agreed to call “asylum centres”. But how can it be, that we so terribly misnamed these places? The word asylum means a place of refuge and foremost of protection. These places are not protecting shelters.

For many they are not even just an unpleasent intermediary before getting the possibility to start a life in which they will not be held captive and tortured for their beliefs. How tragically ironic it must be to stake the lifes of your family and yourself, to escape captivity, be that in any of its forms, only to find yourself captive again, in the very place that should have offered you freedom. I can only faintly imagine the feeling of looking over the fence and trough the barred gates. It must take a very strong heart to feel freedom so close that you can only almost touch it. It must feel like you can sense it, feel it calling for you, like standing at the border of your dreams and hopes, with your feet forever tied in chains. And then, at the end of the day the only thing left is the same concrete walls, the same few square meters.

I can imagine that hope starts to fade. The dream of freedom must seem more and more like just that, a distant dream, twistedly in the same way as, we who have been blessed to live here from the beginning of our lives, tend to let the empathy for our fellow beings fade into the haze of denial, until it is only an unwanted flicker inside us, ghosts we do not want to acknowledge. For many of the people trapped in these borderlands of existence, I can imagine that hope is the only thing left, and when hope is slowly lost, the last foundation of existence begins to crack and disintegrate. I once read that when this last anchor of existence is washed away, and there is no reason left to live, you either die, or the mind short-circuits and invokes insanity as a last means of keeping you alive. That is probably what happened to a woman I heard of, who spent more time talking to two flies she held trapped inside a bottle, than she did talking to her son.

This woman never choose that destiny. She only wanted peace, and a place for her son and herself to live. The responsibility for this fate doesn’t lie where she came from, or anywhere along the way. The responsibility rests here, in my country, it rests with the leaders, the people and with myself. And for that I am ashamed. It was us who trapped her in an existential borderland where no human can survive for very long. We became her ultimate doom, instead of the helping hand that we could have been. This wonderful human being, who came such a long hard way, could have prospered here. Her son could have grown up to feel and love life. But we choose another destiny for her. We must stop blaming others now, and start living up to the responsibilities that we have towards each other.

Candy and Mistrust

While riding the bus today, I had a peculiar experience. A man decided to share some candy with the rest of the passengers. He had a pretty large bag of candy, and walked through the bus, offering everyone some of it. Why he did it I don’t know, he probably just realized that he wouldn’t be able to eat all of it himself, and wanted to share it instead of tossing it.

What struck me was the painfully obvious reaction from everyone he offered some of his candy to. Not a single passenger accepted it. It was so bizarre, and yet so predictable. My own first thoughts were also very skeptical and mistrusting, I was tip-toeing into the borderland of disgust when he offered two small girls some of his candy. Maybe it was a natural reaction from my part, triggered by the fear of pedophiles so inherent in the society I live in. Still I am ashamed, this man was not a pedophile, nor did he wish to do any harm to anybody. He just wished to share some of what was in his possession with the people around him. I am so ashamed that I mistrusted him, and initially rejected him. Intuitively I concluded that something must have been wrong with the candy. How deeply terrible this is! How have we come to this far? We are so afraid of our fellow human beings, and so convinced that others want to do us harm, that we, in the face of an open and sincere expression of generosity, reject each other. This man didn’t want anything in return, he just asked me to take a couple of pieces of candy and enjoy them. I am so glad that he continued speaking after I initially rejected him, which gave me a couple of seconds to catch myself, and act consciously instead. I am so glad that I did, because I used a possibility to base my action on faith in another persons goodness, instead of acting out of fear. Still, I truly regret that I didn’t accept what he was offering from the beginning. Instead of doubting him, I should have thanked him deeply for what he was doing. Whether he knew it or not, he wasn’t just sharing some candy, he was challenging one of the most strangely persistent barriers we invent to defend ourselves.