Culture in the Blender

I’m reading my daily round of news on the Globalist and on BBC News. In light of what I read yesterday and the day before that, I can’t help but wonder what these backlashers make of news items like that the UK will help pay some of Africa’s debts, that the train fire that prompted rioting in Gujarat a few years ago was an accident most likely caused by people cooking on the train, or that two of the main figures in the Srebrenica massacre were convicted today. What role could such information play in a world where they are victims of a vast liberal conspiracy play? Where is there a space for ethnical cleansing, civil war, and poverty? I don’t see one. Maybe that is because I do not understand this worldview and just can’t explore it very well. On the other hand, maybe that is why people like the Daily Illini columnist I mentioned a few days ago lose the big picture. Maybe it’s simply because the information that builds the big picture doesn’t have a place in their worldview and thus doesn’t quite register.

Now that I am old enough to have been alive/there for some of the recent historical background of news, my personal level of involvement has gone up a lot. I remember the news of Srebrenica, and the civil war in general – especially the news of the ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is to me one of those words that everyone learned through the news – kind of like tsunami is in many countries now. I remember the political discussion about whether visas should be required of refugees, of numbers cited of which countries took how mnay refugees, the high school cafeteria discussions about NATO’s intervention, seen as unilateral action on the part of the US.

I also remember the cliqueishness of my junior high school along nationality lines. The Turks kept to themselves, the Iranians kept to themselves, the Swedes – as which I counted, because I was a hidden immigrant and because there were really no other white foreigners – didn’t show interest in letting the foreigners join their social hierarchy. But as related to the news item, I remember the Bosnian refugees, especially the girl in my class. She was tall and thin and so sad. I wished that I could do something to help her, but all I knew about what she’d been through was from TV – and that’s not a patch for anything. Besides which, it would have been difficult for me to win trust in the first place.

One of my early friends in Sweden was the daughter of some Iranian intelligentsia refugees. When I hear news of the democracy movement there, I think of her sometimes. When I attended a talk on islamic feminism two years ago at Knox, I thought of her. When I hear news of parents jailed for abusing their daughters in order to keep them from mixing with secular societies, I think of the women I know who were in the general setup and how furious I would be if they had been abused at home for hanging out with me.

In relation to all this, I also remember the rise in neonazi activity in response to the refugees. I remember the graffiti and the debates on what to do. But above all, I remember the neonazis in junior high. One of them was in my class. He was the ringleader of the badheads in the whole school. He had the standard attire of black bomber jacket, shaved head, Doc Martens, and violent attitude. I’d arrive for class and he’d be sitting there outside the classroom, flicking a butterfly knife in and out. I always would wonder if he’d actually stab someone – like me or one of the refugees or immigrants – if he got pissed off. He had this aura of unpredictability and instability that made you tip-toe around him, lest he decided that you were shit and got on your case. He was friends with one of the neonazi leaders for the whole region, who happened to be my Swedish teacher’s son. This was a shameful secret whispered around the halls.

The moral of this long-winded parenthesis is that such news items draw my attention, because I think of people I’ve met and what this might mean for them. In my worldview, international news has a place to fill. I feel that it concerns my personal sphere because it concerns people in my personal sphere if not myself directly. You can find a link of most world regions pretty easily within your circle of acquaintances, in addition to just putting yourself in their position. Maybe this victim mentality focuses attention on themselves to such a degree that not even large news like the tsunami can jolt their eyes upward, toward the rest of us. That would be very unfortunate.