Somewhere, surfing around, I read the comment, that a refugee was seen wearing an Armani shirt. The woman wrote 'They are all rich! I can't afford a shirt like that!'. The other reactions on a very hateful blog about refugees, written by a Dutch 'thinker', ashamed me to much to repeat them here. Holland at it's narrowst, we call that, but in this case I prefer 'The Dutch clay-people'. They mostly never leave their country, visit campingsites in Drenthe (a province) during their summer-weekends and holidays, do not understand this blog, even if it were written in Dutch. I would like to go on, calling them names, just like they talk and write about refugees, but it's no use, because they are deaf and blind.
Although it does not apply to everyone, traveling abroad is one of the most important things to expand the mind. Getting to know other cultures, meeting people with different habits, different colour, other food, experience their climate, watch their children playing just like ours... Traveling teaches that there is no difference between people all over the world, because they all have one goal: to be happy, to be able love and feed their children, to get respect and grow old.
What thoughts are going on in the minds of those hateful people, writing about there own species as if it were garbage? Is it fear, or just egoism, not willing to share anything with a stranger? If it were fear, they would have lost it decades ago, since The Netherlands opened its borders for the guest workers and since many people from the former colonies came to Holland. I do not believe in fear. This is to easy and probably a socially correct leftwing opinion.
Egoism then! The same egoism we find sticking on the hands of the rich nowadays. Oscar Wilde would never have written 'Individualism and Socialism' if he would have known that his call for individualism (the individual development of man in order to enrich the mind and social circumstances) turned out to be the main cause of our present problems in the world. He saw mankind during a period wherein respect was a common thing. Knowledge, education, decency were achievements and respected instead of dismissed as nonsense, like nowadays. It was Gerrit Komrij (Dutch author) who wrote, that people need a leader with common sense instead of populism, that just tries to gain votes. And with populism he meant all political decisions caused by a screaming population.
In order to think properly, one needs knowledge. It does not want to say that we should all have the same oppinion, but without (correct) information and knowledge, any opinion is based on thin air. We should be able to trust the media (which we mostly can not, because it prefers to be sensational) and we should be able to trust our politicians (which we mostly can not, because they just want many votes). As long as this does not change, we can not expect people to think wise, to think broad-minded.
If the woman I mentioned before would have been in Turkey, she would have known that brand shirts are for sale on any market in the country, and I guess also in Syria, for just a few lira's, because they are all fake!
