The other in you

I think I suffer from otherness color blindness. It is difficult for me to perceive as strangers those that everyone automatically identifies as strangers, foreigners, others. It's not that you can't distinguish cultural, linguistic, religious, phenotypic, or national differences. It is that I am unable to classify people based on such differences. After all, I myself became a kind of foreigner to my own mother, speaking languages ​​that she did not understand or adopting values ​​that she does not share and I know that something similar will end up happening with my own children. If the difference lies in the strongest and deepest of links,How can we speak of the different as if it were an extraterrestrial denying him all the rights? Well, deliberately forgetting or by environmental induction that this stranger also loves and suffers and breathes and thinks and lives and hurts more or less the same things that hurt us. That is to say: the foreigner does not exist, we invent it in our organization of the world by stripping it of its humanity.

It is not easy to live with this type of color blindness when most of those around you do not suffer from it: they look at me and are able to see in me traits that are not their own in these latitudes with a precision that disarms me. Despite how much I have looked at myself in the mirror, I do not see such distinctions in the reflected image. But it's the same. It does not matter until the ability to decide on the lives of those who are considered foreigners comes into play, it does not matter until you have the power to draw a border. In a recent survey 60% of Europeans believe that there are too many immigrants in the EU. Something that surprises me because I do not believe that the number of citizens of this continent will reach 60% who have not lived closely the experience of emigration. The forgetfulness in this case, whether conscious or not, is digging one's own grave:Accepting that "others" are subjected, exploited, trafficked, excluded and left to their fate in the midst of a sea of ​​indifference is to accept that sooner or later we are the ones subjected, trafficked, excluded and abandoned in indifference. Because the "other" is us, a single human species forming "the same contagious tissue", in the words of David Grossman at the beginning of this pandemic.

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60% of Europeans consider the number of immigrants to be excessive

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