Liberté, égalité, fraternité

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

You turn your computer on and everywhere there are people blaming you for not caring about the environment, for not doing enough for starving people, for the children working in factories, are you drinking enough? Are you helping homeless people? Are you supporting the LGBT+ community? What about handicapped people or old people? Did you help during the Covid pandemic or were you one of those sitting at home complaining about nothing to do? Do not forget to work out and get enough movement every day. And what about the ongoing “armed conflicts” (because God forbid, we use the word war for them)? If you google them you get a lot of “the top 10 conflicts to watch in 2020” articles. Like one of those “cats who look like Ryan Gosling” lists. And then we wonder why it is so difficult to take things seriously. Let us make everything funny because we are all getting to stupid to focus for more than 10 minutes on something important. Let us scroll for hours through our Insta feed, watching commercials and ads because the economy needs our brains to be nice mushy and gullible.

And I get it. I understand the frustration of being constantly bombarded with stuff you should care about. And instead of getting depressed about a world that is going down slowly, we like to shut down. Focus on the funny stuff. On the cat lists instead of the 100000 people who died in 2020 because of wars in Egypt, Colombia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel / Palestine, Libya, Mexico, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan, South Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, Yemen[1] or the 397000[2] people who died of Covid. I get it. You cannot focus on everything all the time, but you should be able to tell when there is a possibility to change something. And that is the moment you should speak up. This is the moment to speak up against injustice. This is the moment to show everyone we care. This is the moment to stand up and do our part even if we think we do not have that problem here. Because if you think that, you just did not look long enough to see it. You decided to look away, to ease your conscience. But that does not mean the problem is not there. Now is the time to fight for change.

We are not only standing up for people of colour, we are fighting for all of us. We are protesting against a system that does not work. We are protesting against injustice and we need to understand why people are mad. The whole world saw a man get murdered on camera and there are still people questioning the protests methods in the US. But that is the way change works. The Boston Tea Party would not have gone into our history books if they did not through all that tea into the water in 1773. And I am pretty sure that people were not happy about their methods either. People in the US tried and are still trying to protest peacefully, however it does not seem like the police is making it easy on them. On the contrary. The response of the president and government is making everything worse. Apparently, they forgot the meaning of democracy. A democratic system is a system governed by the people. A system in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections[3]; a system with the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges[4]meaning a system which represents the interests of the people. A system which protects them. Instead the police, the department of government concerned primarily with maintenance of public order, safety, and health and enforcement of laws[5], seems to have forgotten about the safety and health part of the deal and also that they are part of society, not above it.

And we are sitting here in Europe on our asses, watching another abuse of power, without doing anything. Thinking we have it good here. Everything is fine. Why should we get angry? So, my question is: If this were to happen here, wouldn’t you wish for the support of others? You think stuff like that does not happen in Austria? Try googling Ahmed F, Cheibani Wague, Essa Touray, Marcus Omofuma, Edwin Ndupdu, Bakary Jassey, Mike Brennan, Yankuba Ceesay, Richard Ibekwe.

I was really proud of the people who went to protest here in the last few days. Lots of peaceful people demonstrating for a good cause. But as I was standing in the crowd, I noticed that the people there were all very young. Where were the others? I am not taking about grandmas and grandpas (even though they should have been there too), I am talking about the previous generations. The ones borne in the 60s and 70s. Where were those? Have they forgotten that the last time we saw crazy people getting into politics was not that long ago? Have they forgotten that we still have a problem with Nazis here? Have they forgotten the hatred that some people spread everywhere just to scare people and get power out of it? It seems to me like Austrians have not yet changed their way of thinking nothing is their problem unless it is too late. So, they prefer to sit in a coffee shop, drinking cappuccino and wait for others to do the work. Or not. And then what? Wait until the problem gets here and everything will be fine? Sound somewhat familiar to me.

Let us not forget that the French Revolution, the revolution that started the process of liberation from the absolute monarchies in Europe, was built on the idea of freedom, equality and fraternity. A concept dating back to 1789. A concept that we are still not able to respect fully. Where is the equality? Where is the fraternity between people of colour, people of different religions, women, LGBT+, immigrants? Have we gotten so lazy and fat in the brain that we cannot distinguish about right and wrong anymore? Do we not care anymore about anything? And if so, what does that make us?