Powerless and Powerful: a Human Manifesto

Becoming a citizen of the world comes with no shortage of downsides. Never in my life have I felt so powerless. Being in the middle of a fast lane of communication/human interactions make me feel like all the pain going on around me is too much for me to even make a difference. Our world is in decay, our humanity being tested every moment… and we are failing.

If you know something about what’s happening in the world, you know that in the last two months, we heard about a group of Islam extremists that came into a university in Kenya and killed around a hundred fifty students. This was only the tail of many more crimes by extremist groups we decide not to pay attention to. Given that education was a door for social mobility for the 150 families behind the murdered, the event is such a crime and a tragedy on so many levels I dare not to look closer afraid I cannot stand the truth. Last week a friend wrote me to translate a statement for humanitarian help for Yemen.  For me, it’s been even hard to help him spread the message because I’ve been far more worried about a cause next to me: hundreds of African humans are dying just trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea I see from the terrace of my building. I’m bathing on these waters, and I feel I’m somehow an accomplice of the overall indifference to the people crossing and dying trying. This week, I went to retire my residence permit in the Italian police department of Cagliari, and it is heartbreaking to see how all foreigners are treated, like scum, like lowlifes. Some people propose “let’s receive them in Sardinia and make of the island a multicultural laboratory that could potentially boost the economy of the region,” but you have to see the contempt of the majority of Italians to this idea.  My Nepalese friend here got the news that an earthquake hit her city today, and that parts of Kathmandu are now in ruins, hundred presumed dead.  I just wrote her a message on Facebook. What else can I do? To all of these things happening around me, what can I do, really?

I want to look back on my country, then, to see if choosing a cause over there would make me feel less overwhelmed and more focused, but the headlines on the news make me feel hope. There’s a cultural regression. Most people seem to be under a spell, blinded to the dialogue that pushes the country forward and absorbed in their “Game of Thrones-like” political plotting and backstabbing. The media hardly focuses on what’s important. Feeling environmentally responsible is the new placebo for well-being, and people have turned a blind eye to social problems. Costa Rica disappoints me because it has all the potential to step up its game and export models of integral development, yet there we are, having a discussion on race that has been taken out of context, tolerating the airs of grandeur of the Catholic church and being petted by its invisible hand, and seeing how the government has no clear north.  Not a lot of hope coming from my homeland.

It’s so much pain and there are so many just causes, I’m lost and powerless. I don’t know what to show solidarity for, which cause to embrace. I’m on a personal environmental crusade over here. Last week I had to present Costa Rica to a group of kids, and the teacher was not amused to see how strongly I pushed the cause of ecology and sustainability through the explanation of Costa Rica’s fauna. This is my cause, right now, from picking up trash on the nature to separate my trash, reusing paper, giving a new life to glass containers, no longer taking plastic bags at the supermarket.  I try to make people aware that sustainability is the future; that solidarity should take part of our time and efforts. It’s all very vague, but I hope that it all makes sense at the end.

In the middle of all the awe, I have found that I also want to speak out. I might not be Malala, but if I keep on writing is because I feel that is my responsibility to speak out for the world that I want for me and for others. The need of speaking out comes, after all, when you feel no one is shouting loud enough. I feel like I have some lung strength, and that’s when I feel powerful.  I see how others want to relate to me on these terms, and I feel empowered by this little Earth Army that want to make a difference.  The fewer people around you that seem at ease with what’s happening, the more people would feel something’s not entirely ok. This is a healthy kind of anxiety people need to wake up to. We need to make other feels the uneasiness for the suffering of others and understand that when we allow other humans to suffer, nothing can really guarantee we are not going to be next.

There’s a book called “The White’s Man Burden” by William Easterly, in which the author says human aid in Africa has failed because all we learn to do is to send money, not to guide them to construct better models of development. It applies to all contexts in need. The “white man”, the alien, would never become a savior: people should learn how to save themselves and all foreigners can do is helping providing the tools they may need that the developed world has and they don’t. We’re also very comfortable keeping Africa poor and alienated, bleeding from afar so that we can send ban aids to perpetuate the idea that we are compassionate.  I am only a wanderer here, I’m passing. I cannot tell Europeans how to react to their neighboring continent’s problems, but I can speak, hoping that they start changing their mentality and their indifference to African problems.  By now, people around me should now that I’m not happy about the injustice in the world, and that’s a start.  Being a global citizen starts with understanding humanity is one, and that I should spread kindness to all the people around me. I may not be superman, but as long as I have the power of one, it’s in my hands to try to make a difference.