She is me. You are me. I am you. We are we.
We're on a long car journey across France from the Pyrenees. The last 24 hours saw us breaking the journey in my beloved Annecy. As ever it was magical to be close, albeit briefly, to the utterly captivating beauty of the lake. Tonight, we're contrasting Annecy with a stopover in a particularly ugly and damp-smelling budget motorway hotel close to the city of Troyes as we make our way back to Le Shuttle. Annecy and this ugly Troyes hotel would not normally have much in common but tonight, for me, they do. It goes like this:
When I saw a group of Annecy primary school children this morning, innocently walking hand in hand as they meandered after their Maitresse through a picturesque street, I remarked to Chris how lovely but bittersweet it was to see them. Being in Annecy again had reminded me that it was only a few decades ago that Nazi soldiers had brutally abducted a handful of such primary school children from their teachers and classmates, dispatched them on a Holocaust train to Auschwitz and murdered them on arrival. The treachery playing out against such a beautiful backdrop somehow amplifies the horror.
This evening, I was loitering in the hotel reception as I'd accidentally locked myself out of my room. I got chatting to a young girl who, it turned out, was ten. And Armenian. A girl who spoke Armenian, French, some English (which she had fun practising on me) and Russian too! Turns out she's also a girl who is an Armenian refugee fleeing the effective 'ethnic cleansing' conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. And staying indefinitely in a mouldy roadside hotel. I learned all this because I'd said I also had a little girl who was nearly ten too and that she had been to school in France but was now at school in Scotland. My new Armenian buddy asked me where I was from originally and I said England but that we'd previously lived in France. She then asked if I'd been brought to this region of France by the CAO too. I googled 'CAO' and realised Centres d'accueil et d'orientation was an organisation overseeing temporary housing for refugees. I sheepishly told her - no, the CAO had not brought me there.
These reminders of damascene clarity about our universal oneness happened to me today against a backdrop of Britain's revoltingly shameless Home Secretary taking to the world stage to sow fear and division. Spewing up her hypocritical, anti-multiculturalist, 'let's blame ALL our problems on refugees and immigrants' twist on the radical right's democracy-destabilising - Great Replacement (conspiracy) Theory.
All I know is this: Ten year old girls are ten year old girls. Children are children and children grow into adults. I know it often feels to me like yesterday that I was a child too. I also know that it does not matter one jot where children originate from; what colour, class, nationhood, religion or creed they inherit as a geographic accident of birth. They are children. ‘They’ are human. They are not just ‘others’ to be put in a de-humanised group so they can, over time, be acceptably eradicated. No, ‘they’ are you and she is me, you are me and we are all just, we.
I know too that it is the foetid, diarrhoea-like words that hatefully drip from Suella Braverman's tongue that lead to latent acceptance of a random pick'n'mix of our world's children being murdered in front of our eyes or such children having to flee from racist murderers and live in grotty roadside hotels.
I don't have any answers. I just know that the Home Secretary’s words are a manifestation of evil in action. And that we need to acknowledge that openly. And not let her get away with it.
#hopenothate
