acknowledgement

When the villagers gather around the coffee table, they discuss things that's happened recently, a month ago, a year ago, and forty years ago. I've already talked about this; the temporal horizon is, at times, stunning. Examples from the past are picked out so as to prove some general point about a person or a group of persons. Things tend to evolve around proving things to be one way or another. I don't know the impetus behind this urge, but that's how it is with them. The topic of debate today was romani people, or, as the villagers would have it, gypsies. They complained a while about the "gypsies" who come to their houses and try to sell stuff. It's hard to make them realize that their attitudes towards romani people, who they consider to be dishonest and somehow asocial, express racism. They just defend themselves by mentioning yet another example, yet another experience, of "being fooled by a gypsy". We (my sister and I) try to set things in perspective: we go through social-economic history and we try to make them understand that they project their own stereotypes upon these people, and that these stereotypes will end up living their own, destructive lives.

I'm not saying that I am a person who lacks every tendency towards racist thinking. But I hope that whenever these tendencies pop up, I will abstaim from rationalization and, instead, try to deal with them for what they are: corrupt.

Obviously, the problem with racism is not that it expresses a misunderstanding of the facts, so that racism would disappear were we simply given the correct information about the world. My relatives don't want to think about their own attitudes to these people, they don't want to think about how they treat them. They explain away the things that would place them in a bad light; "well, I don't think he's bad, but it's something wrong with how they live..."

In a newspaper article a few days ago, a very strange and scary idea was stated. Helsinki people are, according to the article, bothered by the romanians who are seen begging for money. A guy representing some public authority claimed that the problem is that Finnish citizens, who live in a wealthy EU country, tend to react negatively when they are confronted with begging. In my opinion, this is like saying: "we don't want to see these people, they make us uncomfortable. We are rich, but we don't want to think about that. We don't want to see other people's misery. Just send them back to their own poor society."

In the general discussion (in newspapers etc.) about "those people" who come here to "live off our great welfare system" we easily get the impression that Finland is a great country for everyone to live in, a paradise on earth. This is hardly the case. From a recent article in Helsingin sanomat:

The Roma say that they are ashamed of begging, but that they have no alternatives. They say that they want to go home as soon as they get the money they need to travel. Two families have already left. "I don't recommend Finland to anyone. It is cold here, you don't get anything on the streets, and nobody gets work", Trandafir Musca says. The streets are not always safe, either. "We have been kicked and spat on. One passer-by grabbed the coin cup and spat in it.