What the [beep] happened to us?
Did you see this news story from earlier this week?
As comedy writer Simon Blackwell put it:
“What the fuck has happened to us?”
You know what’s happening here? We are now just one step away, as another comedian put it, from “forcing certain people to wear a special armband so we know who they are. You know, perhaps a star? A yellow one?”
What the actual frak?
Have we completely lost it? How is this happening in the year 2016? Isn’t this supposed to be the age of enlightenment?
This is so far beyond anything that is even remotely acceptable that it’s unbelievable.
And it’s not just happening in the fringes of society, it’s happening center stage, by the largest political groups. If you ever wonder how Hitler was able to come to power in the 1930s, this is it. It’s exactly the same message. It’s exactly the same mentality. It’s exactly the same campaigning of blaming ‘others’ for problems they have no part of.
I can’t even describe how this makes me feel. Britain is sick, something rotten has wormed its way in and Britishness means full-on xenophobia
If you LEGIT think foreigners are taking jobs, why not:
-Strengthen workers’ rights
-Increase minimum wageHint: because it’s not about that.
He is right. This has nothing to do with foreigners taking British jobs or the jobs in any other country. This is pure xenophobia.
This should not be happening!
When I grew up, I was told stories about the Second World War and other atrocities, and thought to myself that I was so lucky to live in a modern society were these events where a thing of the past.
But now they are back and we have to endure another period of outright racism, bigotry,and public display of intolerance.
And just like every time this has happened in the past, the result is going to be disastrous. The lessons from our history of intolerance are crystal clear.
Why is this happening again?
“What the fuck has happened to us?”
How did we turn from being a progressive society into a bunch of isolationists who express intolerance towards anyone and anything. How did we go from being a basically forward looking society into becoming a society of ultra nationalistic extremists?
This is not okay. This is not who we are!
This is what we used to be before we became enlightened. This is how we used to act back when we didn’t care about humanity. This is how we behaved back when we were merely barbaric tribes.
But this is 2016, people!
This is the age of equality, of connectives, of dreaming, of taking things one step further, and of this:
The false narrative
But here is the thing, I don’t blame people for being afraid of the future and strangers. In the past 15 years, the world has opened up at a rate that makes us feel like we don’t have a home anymore.
When something bad happens on the other side of the planet, we hear about it as if it happened just next door.
I get why this is scary. I get why when people hear that something really bad happened that they are scared of helping the refugees who are fleeing from it.
It’s not logical that people act this way, and I think it’s a terrible way to react, but I understand when some people do. You are afraid of the unknown, and instead of blaming yourself, you blame others.
The real problem is the narrative that is then formed, or rather, the false narrative. And let me illustrate this in a very clear way:
Here is a list of different types of people:
Let’s look at them in terms of how well they are able to integrate with others.
Ask yourself this: Do Asians have a problem being friends with Hispanics? No, of course not. They generally get along just great.
What about lesbians? Can they figure out how to have great friendships with black people? Oh yes! There is no problem there.
What about that refugee from Syria? Can she have a wonderful friendship with people who are agnostic? Oh yes. They have no problem ‘integrating’ with each other.
In fact, if you look at this and you draw a line between all the people who have no problem integrating with each other, you get this:
You will notice that almost all of these have absolutely no problem integrating with each other, to form friendships and to share their existence with each other.
But there is one group of people that stands out. It’s nationalists.
They are the only ones who are completely incapable of integrating with everyone. They are the only ones who can look at a person as they walk down the street and instantly hate them for just being there.
This is where the real problem is.
We don’t have an integration problem. We don’t have a problem with foreigners, or with people who have decided to live their lives in a different way. That part works just fine.
The only problem we have is with the nationalists who have decided to blame everyone else for their own failure to integrate with people who are slightly different from them.
It’s the nationalists who can’t integrate, not the immigrants. The immigrants are integrating just fine.
And yet, every single day when you open the newspaper, you see yet another story that blames the problems on these other groups. Every newspaper carries the false narrative that it’s the nationalists who are right, that everyone has a problem integrating with each other, and that the world should be isolationist and homogenous.
Look at the media coverage over the past 5 years. Look at what our politicians are saying. Look at our immigration policies. The focus of blame is incredibly one-sided.
We are talking about the wrong things. We are blaming perfectly brilliant people because they are not as close-minded as the nationalists.
Why?
“What the fuck has happened to us?”
How did we end up having such a false narrative being expressed in such a dominant way?
Let me give you an example from my country. About a month ago, a danish high school started getting complaints from white nationalistic parents that there were too many 2nd generation immigrants in each class.
Remember, these are kids born in this country. That’s what being a second generation mean. They are not foreigners. They are born here.
So what happened?
Well, first the school decided to segregate the classes by ethnicity, so that they could offer more ethnically pure classes. Secondly, when the public started debating this, one of our prominent politicians went on national TV where he told one of these students that he wasn’t sure the student was really Danish.
“What the fuck has happened to us?”
These kids were born and raised in this country. They are not just fully integrated, they are as Danish as everyone else.
This school didn’t have any form of integration problems. It didn’t have any problem with these kids not playing well with others. There was no problem here.
The only problem here was that some white nationalistic parents started worrying about their kids being influenced by others, which caused the school to worry that maybe they wouldn’t get as many white students next year.
The problem wasn’t the 2nd generation immigrant kids. They are already perfectly integrated and were doing great. The problem here are the idiotic parents, and the xenophobic politicians… who got scared by seeing kids from other cultures having a good time.
This is ethnic racism, pure and simple. And it’s wrong.
The real problem is the narrative. These parents and the politicians successfully managed to convince the public that this was a really big problem, causing other politicians to also raise their support of trying to prevent too many kids of a certain type of being in each class.
And for an entire week, we could read article after article in the newspapers about all hinting at how scary this all is. Even the few articles that defended them were immediately followed by several other stories about how big a problem we have with integration.
…and so, we end up with a society where bigotry, intolerance, and constant hate speech towards even school kids becomes the new norm.
But it doesn’t even stop there, because it’s not just what people do, it’s also what dominates our focus. As one person tweeted:
Immigration is, generally speaking, not a problem. It’s not a problem in the US. It’s not a problem in the UK. It’s not a problem in Denmark. It’s not a problem in France.
There are a few problems with crime in isolated areas, but those represent a tiny and insignificant part of to total number of immigrants, and studies have generally proved that immigrants don’t commit more crime overall.
Let me give you an example. Here is a list of what is killing people in America, as an average over the past 10 years.
Try counting the number Syrian refugees on this list, or Mexicans.
And yet, in the US presidential election, the main focus of concern is on trying to prevent Muslim immigrants and other foreigners from entering the country.
Why are we blaming Muslim immigrants when the problem is clearly with lawnmowers and sleep walkers?
Or what about jobs? Well, let’s look at the UK.
What we find is a very consistent message that immigrants end up providing a net positive for the countries they settle. In other words, immigrants overall pay more in taxes and create more new jobs than they take.
This is true for every single country.
So, again, we are focusing on a false narrative. And yet, the UK is now planning to do this:
“What the fuck has happened to us?”
I will leave you with this quote from writer and journalists, George Orwell, from all the way back in 1946.
It has been 70 years, and we are still faced with ignorant hostility by a misinformed public and the political parties that use it to win votes.
We can do better. We must do better!
This false narrative has to end. And it starts with us in the media. The next time a politician goes on like this, we need to say. “Sorry, that’s not really such an important issue that you try to make it to be. I’m going to cover these other and far more important issues.”
This is our job as journalists. Our job is not to be the PR channels for politicians and the promoters of false narratives. Our job is to make sure the public is never misinformed. That includes making sure that we focus on what actually matters.
If our politicians want people to focus on something that clearly isn’t a problem, our job is to cover something else.
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