Ok, Blog, I’m back more or less.
I should start like little girls do when they write in their diaries “Dear Blog, I am sorry for being away for so long and subsequently neglecting you."
But that brings up Anne Frank’s diary and whenever I remember her, my heart cringes the same way it did when I was 12 and read the diary for the first time.
Well, there were so many things happening lately worth letting out but my arm could not be subdued to do the work for such a long time without protesting violently. I think that we both improved a bit right now, me & my right shoulder plus my right arm and subsequently my wrist as connected appendages and intermediaries.
In the first place of importance to me was that case with the Sudanese boy which gave me nausea and headaches and even a nightmare or two.
It went like this - one day at work we heard sirens and commotion and we assumed that some accident happened down there in the street not far from our building.
I work at the 10th floor and I already had lunch by then, but other people in the office did not yet, so they went out and then came back with the news.
A kid was stabbed just across the street, right in the middle of the day, right in the middle of the city and apparently right in the middle of his heart.
Must be one of those “damned black boys” one of the many blond girls scorned. When she said “black” she said it like this people do here in this country, with hatred. “I saw a whole bunch of black schoolgirls crying in the street, he must be black - she went on”.
“They are a good for nothing lot” somebody else said. She was Italian. “Oh, they must be Sudanese” an English woman commented, “they are wild and nasty and they have no idea how to sort out their problems otherwise, the only way they know how-to is with a knife or a bludgeon. They shouldn‘t be here at all, the bastards” she went on. “They are very bad, lazy people. They don‘t want to work“. She was an expert always on Black Issues - she knew it all. Besides, why not - she’s the Work Relations Representative of our office…Isn’t that nice? It says it all.
A Polish woman went on the Internet to search for news. The incident happened just 30-45 minutes before, but it was already on the Internet - another Sudanese stabbed a Sudanese boy.
“Do not walk in the street today" - the blond warned us expertly. It’s dangerous. I’m calling my brothers to pick me up from work - she said. "I’m not gonna leave the building on my own“ she added.
They all went on and on and on about how these bloody emigrants ruin the country and the good manners and everything else. How they were building up gangs. How dangerous the gangs were. How they do not work. How they do not have skills. How they dress - where are the money coming from for those clothes!? Very trendy too…Etc etc etc.
Some Australian beauty suggested that they should all be returned instantly to their country of origin.
"What about that Tasmanian guy that killed 35 people at Port Arthur just for fun? " - I asked naively; "where should he be deported?"
She did not really enlighten me because the guy was not Sudanese and probably in her mind he had mitigating circumstances since he was blond and blue eyed like herself; therefore a superior being with reason and who did not sort out his problems with a knife or a bludgeon. As a superior blond being he used a machine gun, expensive and sophisticated and instead of reckoning some tribal conflict, he killed because he was bored with life and under-achievement - therefore he gained a place in one of the Guinness Book of Records I presume.
An important achievement after all, why should anyone want to deport such a star anywhere?
My shoulder was hurting, my arm too and their rambling made me mad and mad again. I kept quiet though and took no part in it because I know myself too well.
If I break into it I’ll trash this people. I’ll tell them off so well that they’ll hate me forever. I could have told them things nobody else ever told them in a way that they should have remembered for a log time. But now I just wanted all of it to die out. I was tired and I knew from before when racial slur crept in our office that I was the only one standing up to them.
How sad is that?!!
If I did so, they labeled me an idiot; after all I was the only one. That was good enough proof that the majority was right and I was wrong, no question about it. They never stopped for a minute trying to reflect on whatever it was that I said. They could not care less that I ridiculed their fears and ignorance or I tried a mild, almost friendly kind of reasoning with them.
There’s no reasoning with idiots and ignorants. I know that, but still I cannot give up yet. It’ll always be next time.
The racial slur went on for about 3 hours, every now and then. Then it turned into a cascade with no stopping and no dissimulation. The more they talked, the louder and more aggressive they became in their comments.
They just wanted them out, all those good-for-nothing blacks. At least, if the Indians were here in large numbers for example and very rude to everyone, most of them at least had jobs.
It was too much for me, far too much. For half a day I could not concentrate on my work - I was so mad and bottling it up until I almost exploded.
Now, being there alone at last after 5 pm I worked, but my mind was only dissecting their words and attitudes one by one.
What was scary was how they were united in their hatred. They were of different origins but all born here, except for the English woman; and she was the worst of them all.
I was the only one apparently feeling sorry that a 14-year child was killed by another 14 year old. I could feel the parent’s pain; pain has no color. Motherhood has no race. Children are just children - there's a reason why they cannot tell right from wrong. That is why we won't allow them to work, drive and vote too early.
I was a mother myself after all.
What if something like that had happened to may own son when he was that age? The fact that it did not happen did not make me impenetrable to the understanding of pain a mother feels when she loses a child.
I knew that according to clan and tribe tradition when the tradition is a duty of honor, there might be reprisals in the future.
I thought of how hard must be for the Sudanese in a society like this one, populated with my co-workers, where the norm was hatred against them. In a society of ignoramuses where no one was concerned or knowledgeable about their history or culture or conflicts; where nobody cared or knew where the Sudanese were coming from or what happened to them there.
Nobody really cared what happened to them here.
Everybody was just happy that political correctness was in place and pretended to put the national policies at the same level with the rest of the world when in fact we were living in one of the most racist and covertly discriminating society. It wasn’t any better than their parents’ society of the Fifties and Sixties.
They were nothing else but a bunch of rednecks with computers. Technology was the only difference between their world and that of their ignorant parents.
Nothing in their behavior and manner reminded me of the fact that we were in the 21 Century.
That night the news broadcasters took care of the incident with comments, interviews and traffic videotapes, making a big fuss.
An enormous fuss.
I knew how out of proportion it was because I remember instances when kids killed other kids in incidents that were hardly at the beginning of the news bulletins on every channel.
Those kids were not African though…
So, there it was: a kid of 14 who died. There was not much compassion in the Media. The word that appeared most frequently was "Sudanese". Not child or crime or murder or stabbing or incident or something like that. But rather "Sudanese Community, Sudanese Mother, Sudanese Gangs, Sudanese Minority, Sudanese...."
His photo showed us a child with a bit of acne, like any other that age eventually. He was a good student they said and an excellent soccer player.
He won prizes.
He was wearing his school uniform when he died because he was just coming from school, from where his mother actually picked him up. She was with him when the others started the chase. She ran after them managing to catch up in time to see her baby stabbed to death by 3 boys. She was a tall, strong built woman. She was wearing a long, narrow dress and that probably slowed her down in catching up with the young.
The Police arrived instantly because they probably noticed the chase on the traffic cameras. They used mace on the attackers but two managed to escape. One was in hospital, badly hurt - I never understood by whom.
The second incident that day - a police car being forgotten parked on a hill without a parking brake on by a patrol team and subsequently entering a house through the wall of the kitchen, almost killing a single mum, passed unnoticed by everyone.
Maybe that was actually the reason for the fuss around this stabbing.
But by the tone of the voices of the passers-by interviewed, maybe not.
The next day at work, the news was all the rage. People were passing the newspapers form each other - they knew “everything”.
The rambling and trashing started early.
The blond went on asking me, of all people, if my daughter arrived safe home the previous night, because “two killers were still at large”. The age of the "two killers" added together was hardly 25.
“The blacks from Africa are not wanted in our city“ said the Australian beauty of the previous day.
The English woman was explaining to everyone who had time to listen how bad, how dirty and how dangerous “blacks” were in general. How they know nothing, praise nothing and just live on welfare everywhere in the world.
The Italian woman received a phone call later that day.
One of her daughters was the same age the dead boy was. She was crying and her sister could not comfort her, so she called their mother at work to ask for advice.
An Asian kid at school knew the dead kid from the time they were learning English at a special school for the newly arrived.
The Italian Mother started scolding her daughter on the phone: “Don’t be silly! You have no reason to cry for him. OK, OK, he was a good kid - so what? That’s what you think. Good kids do not hung around with the wrong crowd. He did. He’s dead. If he really was a good kid he would be alive, not dead.”
I don’t know what the girl said and the Mother went again ”You start to annoy me. What is it to you? So what if he was a friend with him? He’s Chinese, it’s his parent’s business not ours. He’s not even Italian. What do I care what the Chinese do? I cannot understand what are you crying for, stupid girl? He was not your relative…” The girl was not buying it, so in the end the mother cut the conversation short by hanging up on her.
By the time I could not hold it any more and had an outburst, half of them went home already and only two were left.
I trashed those two pretty good. One was the Italian, the other one Australian and the third, of German descent. I told them about Sudan, what was going on there, how these refugees are traumatized. I spoke about factions, religious war, warlords, drought, poverty, clans, tribes etc.
I said that if one of them could point Sudan on the map for me and tell me the name of the capital of that country, I will almost forgive them.
I added that if they can name to me the currency of that country and two main religious denominations, I will almost forget how racist they were.
Of course they knew nothing of any of these but they did not care anyway.
So, in order to cut the crap and shut them up, I told them that we were public officers working in a government department and this type of vilifying was against the law. That it was likely someone could lodge a complaint and then they’ll all going to be in trouble.
I had to blackmail them with that just to shut them up.
They looked at me with hatred and contempt. Like I gave a s%#*!
Finally they went home and I stayed late and worked, despite my shoulder pain.
I had to catch up for 2 days of disruption.
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