''Imperceptibly..'' 20 years after the fall of the ''Wall of Shame''
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Today Βerlin celebrates. Humanity celebrates. The Wall of Berlin is just a (bad) memory.Thousands of blogs, newspapers, channels will broadcast live from the German capital in orderto commemorate an event which changed the world as we know it.
Many of them will surely speak of the remaining walls which still stand in the planet: Korea, Cyprus, US-Mexico border, Palestine, Nothern Ireland and many more.However, beyond the above, it seems that there is another Wall, an invisible one, which was built without understanding how and why..''Imperceptibly'' as Constantine P. Cavafy wrote in his own poem ''Walls''. Nor a race, a religion or a social status.
This wall knows no homeland.It exists ''imperceptibly'' in every one of us.
It is the same wall which prevents us from hearing, offering, loving. Look at yourself in the mirror,think for a while and ask yourself: Do I really listen to people when they talk to you, or I just hear? Do I really understand their problems? People do not communicate anymore. Even in pubs, cafes, or wherever you see people socialize, you can notice that actually people do not communicate. They are just having parallel monologues. We do not actually listen to what our fellow has to share with us. What we are thinking, is our own problem, which of course is much more ''serious''. We are the centre of our world. We and our own-problems.You can test my argument if you just notice, some small ''imperceptible'' things that we do in many cases. You walk in the street and you can notice that nobody watches were the other people are going..That's why when we ''crush'', nobody knows to which direction to head! It is the same ''imperceptible'', slight stare over the beggar, the homeless the migrant, which we unwittingly cast. We ignore the problem and we move on.There is no actual communion between us anymore. Everything spins around our Ego.
The Age of Communication, which is supposed to be the revolution of our era, didnt manage to bring us closer. It actually did it, technically speaking, but the very context of communion changed. It became ''communication'', it was described in quantitative terms. The word communion is made of ''common'' and ''union''.; it is know known through various acronyms like WAP, SMS, ADSL, 3G, WIFI, BROADBAND. Human interaction, human relations, are no more interpreted through quality but through quantity: charge per minute, volume of data.But today, communication is just a series of means
A person I love, once wrote that''when things which cannot be measured, start to appear through digits and numbers, then you can be sure, that we count in reverse to the end..''
We have created a world, were there is only room for one person: ME. All the others, are just people passing through, minor actors in the show..
These are the walls we have to tear down. It is the same walls who prevent us from being tolerant and open. These walls make us ready to through a stone against anything different, instead of embracing it. These walls prevent us of the poor, the immigrant, the opponent. These walls are the very routes of racism, the cornerstone of a new Holocaust.Berlin Wall is also known as the ''Wall of Shame''. However, even though the Wall has fallen, this doesn't means that shame actually left.Shame is all around us.
, where 1 out of 3 doesnt has access to food. Shame is existant when the victims of a war are regarded as either or . Shame is existant when human suffering enters in a TV-box and can generate money for the channels.Shame is existant when poverty is a statistics measure''mistakes'', ''collateral damage''
Human pain and suffering is non countable.
The refugee who lost his house in Famagusta, Cyprus in 1974, lost the same house as the Darfur-refugee last year. The immigrants from Mexico who are trying to reach the American ''Land of Promise'' have no different intentions to those East-Germans who died in the Berlin Wall, when trying to cross it. The family which found itself half in Pyong Yang and half in a Seoul-suburb is the same family which was divided in 1961 between Eastern and Western Berlin.The mother from Palestine, who holds in her hands the body of her dead child, feels the same pain as the Michaelangelo's known Pieta...