Don’t build walls, build a new world!
There’s this German phrase “gegen eine Wand anrennen” which is the equivalent for bashing one’s head into a wall, but literally means running into a wall over and over again. I have been feeling like that for quite some time.
I never knew exactly how many walls there were (Wendy Brown can tell you more about that), but for a while now I’ve been observing the take-over of the Hungarian parliament by the conservative right party Fidesz with their head Viktor Orban and their buddy-party far right, nationalist Jobbik. In summer 2015 when the so-called “refugee crisis” emerged, Hungary started to build a fence to keep out the unwanted and thus breaking the Schengen agreement. At the same time, they refused to register the people that were passing through Hungary and instead drove them in buses from one side to the other, therefore backing out of their responsibility regarding the Dublin III regulations(which is a terrible agreement anyways).
Germany was divided between people who wanted to close down the borders and others who were fighting for a “welcome culture”. While Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that she would keep the borders open, many were not happy with her decision and started blaming her for every fail in infrastructure. The discussions about dropping the Schengen agreement went on, nationalist voices in Europe grew stronger and people kept on asking me, how much longer Merkel would stay in office.
One day, I was sitting in the subway reading the newsflash. For weeks now reports about refugees in Europe had been getting worse, with news taking a stand for repressive and nationalist politics. One newsflash stood out to me: In the Greek border village Idomeni refugees supposedly started attacks. What the (granted: always super short) news didn’t say was, that people were kept from moving on into Macedonia, and the ‘camp’ they stayed in had insufficient water and food resources.
This September, I came to the United States. The months before I left Germany, I had only been keeping up loosely with the upcoming elections since so much stuff was going on already right next to me (for another example, see: Brexit). Walls stayed present in my everyday life, as their most famous propagator “Make America Great again” Trump was all up in my face everywhere!
Wherever I went, I kept running into walls. Whereas Wendy Brown says the desire for walls comes from a feeling of needed security, I have never felt as insecure as I do now.
As a social activist, I am aware that there are many problems in this world. A lot of them seem scary, some of them end up being life threatening. I also know that people interpret problems differently and that not everyone will have the same solutions in mind as I do. To an extent, I can work with that! But now, so many people are calling for an imagined community of which I and so many others are not supposed to be part of. Even more so, people want to build walls around that — might as well say it — nation, claiming that it was theirs to begin with and violently pushing everyone out who looks threatening to them.
While the FBI constructs a Terrorist Diaspora, enforcing racism against anyone who might potentially be Muslim, I still meet people in the classroom and on the streets and I read about many more that — yes! — want to solve problems in the world. But instead of building walls, they reach out to each other, becoming a community in solidarity beyond borders.
I am scared of what might happen in the near future. I am afraid of how Trump being President-elect might influence elections in other countries. But I will not fence myself in! Because in these historical times, strangers, Queers, People of Color, Activists, friends, family, and so many more have made me feel not more secure, but empowered instead! Let’s keep on tearing walls down to build the world in which we don’t need them anymore.
