I wonder…

When 2016 started, I had high hopes and plans for my future. I even started feeling I had become a part of ‘the global society’. The feeling of belonging for the first time in my life was overwhelming and the warmth of positive emotions surged thrgough my body. I felt invincible! I couldn’t have been more wrong…

My newfound confidence and certainty that the world is slowly but surely, becoming a better place for everyone because we are all, including the world leaders, following the same principles rooted in moral grounds common to all people, and laws insuring that every human being is as important as the ones living in ‘golden mansions’ was shattered. Brexit showed me how naive and wrong I was! A citizen of a second sort. Here in the UK and in the country where I was born, for it had been announced by the leader of the PiS party (a very adequate acronym in English ) Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Of course he wasn’t after me personally. I just happen to support the opposition. As my father used to sing, borrowing the lyrics from Polish comedians ‘I was always in the opposition I expect a proposition’. Here the proposition is to call me names, spit in my face, and shove me out of the country (not possible as I left 12 years ago) because I have different views and opinions to what the government and the church are preaching. But I guess they are only following the footsteps of those that they look up to: the USA…and for Kaczynski that’s probably it. By the way, it must be very difficult for him to follow anybody’s footsteps with his short legs. But I digress and have devoted too much of my precious time and space to someone whom I despise.

Going back to the disappointments of 2016 that have been haunting us and keep many of us awake at night. I have to voice my concernes about the fact that powerful people with money and high political positions have been making statements or even have broken the law in public and yet no one is holding them accountable for their actions and words. They make public appearances, give speeches and show everyone who has ever had any doubts about acting on their hate towards others, that it is OK! I am not a lawyer but I am quite sure that there are laws clearly stating that if someone is egging on others to commit crimes they are commiting a crime too. The aftermaths of Brexit and the USA elections are, as everyone knows, the rise in hate crime against people that became scapegoats for politicians. But not only that. For those countries to openly state that they support leaders who are xenophobic, homophobic, create divisions and inequalities it’s like giving the rest of the world a green light to do all that and chip in a few of their own ideas to ruin humanity.

To show that we believe in equality and no one stands above the law, in each hate crime case that goes to court, Farage, Cameron, Johnson, Trump, Kaczynski, Le Pen and many others, whose political campains caused any kind of illegal behaviour towards any of the protected characteristics, should be tried alongside.

It pains me to see that again the reports of such crimes often talk about muslim women being targeted. And so I come back to the point that I made in one of my earlier posts.It is easy to abuse a woman, more so if she is with a small child or a baby, or pregnant. No threat there for the abuser. She will protect the child and won’t retaliate. Sometimes there are several ‘courageous’ men attacking a woman, trying to rip the hijab of her head. Such an honourable act of… stupidity and hate.

But there is another ‘oppressed group’ that no one talks about because they don’t complain simply because often they don’t know they are being abused and that the reason for the abuse is their ethnicity. They are children in schools. Schools are full of people, just like streets, shopping centres and other public places. People are easily biased and have different opinions about things.There are laws against certain behaviours but, as stated earlier, they can be violated without repercussions in public, then how difficult it is in schools where children often do not have the awareness that what is happening is wrong. Children can bully other children for many different reasons and the educators are there to teach that those ‘different things’ are not good reasons to give someone a hard time or make them feel worse, unwanted or worthless. But what if educators share the views that ‘the others’ are just annoying strangers and become the opressors and what if other adults choose to ignore the wrong doing of other adults, just like in the streets and other public places, but for different reasons? What then?

So what are you going to do about it 2017? Are you going to help us change the situation and make the humankind get back on track towards a common goal? Maybe it is an experiment conducted by aliens and they will claim Trump, Farage and others soon if we show them that we learned the lesson after WWII and we can’t be easily manipulated but then again, we would have to change the way we teach the history in very country…wishful thinking.

For 2017 I ask everyone to consider the question by a great writer:

‘To be equal or not to be?’