Before I get into the heart of this post I want to make one thing clear. I’m not opposed to gun ownership. I’m in favor of certain gun controls, which I’ll mention later, but I am against outright bans. I’m also opposed to bad arguments, and there are many used by pro-gun advocates. One of these arguments that I hear frequently is that if guns were unavailable, or harder to access, it would just mean that another type of weapon would be used which would be equally deadly. Usually knives or clubs are mentioned.
The common phrase of “bringing a knife to a gun fight” points to the lie in this claim. It’s so obvious that a firearm is a superior weapon to a knife that it has become an idiom! Another way to easily demonstrate the disingenuousness of this claim is to simply say to the person making it…
Abandoned by their families, because they left already for the US or because they don’t have enough money to support them, or abandoned by their states, who leave them in poverty and in the insecurity of criminality, the children of Latin America, like the children of the other continents of the so called “global south,” have been forgotten for long time. Sometimes they get to the news because of some NGOs reporting the level of human poverty among them, or because of some international event, like the World Cup in Brazil, exposing the prostitution and the drug-addiction to which they are relegated. But for the most part they are the forgotten citizens of our modern world. They don’t have voice, no right to vote, no income or revenue, no tax payment and no possibility to defend themselves from the violence and the power of the adults. Pedophilia, increased since some decades also through globalization, is not only a phenomenon of the Catholic Church, it is a symbol of the defenselessness and the violence in which the children, in particular of the “global south”, are living in our modern times.
This violence and insecurity of young ages is an emblem of our modern global inequality and discrimination, because when there is exploitation by the powerful to the powerless the first to be caught in the net are the most powerless among the powerless, not only and probably not so much women and elderly today, but more and more the children. Either as soldiers, prostitutes, workers or street beggars the children of the poor countries of the world are living aberrant lives. Lives of animals, not human beings. While they should be our most precious human beings, they are abandoned by our societies, which are too busy to deal with the patriarchal values of power and money to think about protection of the vulnerables.
The children of Central American poor countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, are arriving to the border of the US in thousands recently. In the past years many of them were caught at the border with Mexico, or inside the Mexican state, but with Mexico struggling more and more with drug war nowadays the children have more possibilities now to reach the US using the famous “death trains”. Recently John Kerry said that the US feel co-responsible of the poverty and insecurity that the children in Central America are living and that force them to leave towards the north. Since last October over 47,000 unaccompanied minors have crossed the border into the US, suffering from mistreatment and mental health issues before to be send back to their countries to live again the same miserable lives and waiting to escape again. This rising in numbers respect to former years is caused also by the long term rumors that the future Obama immigration policy would have allowed sooner or later the unauthorized migrants to be regularized in the US, in particular the children. But one year after the US Senate passed the bipartisan comprehensive reform bill today the House of Congress, dominated by Republican party, doesn’t seem interested in approving the bill (see on this the article on CNN, with also an interesting documentary: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/06/27/a-year-from-senate-passage-foes-advocates-of-immigration-reform-battle-on/ )
After the increasing of these numbers in the last period may be the US Congress will start to talk about this issue again or may be the US government will start to think about how to help to change the situation from where these children escape and do something regarding the drug wars, the criminality and the poverty in those countries in the American backyard. But citizenship remains the fundamental discriminatory tool of our modern times of the North versus the South, not only in the Western Hemisphere. Migrations have always existed but only after decolonization rich states started to defend their borders with more stricter rules, afraid of the invasion of the poor people. But migration are natural movements of humankind and cannot be stopped. Besides this, the modern migrations are caused by the conflicts and suffering lived by the poor countries, facilitated, if not produced, by the rich countries. So it is time to think differently, with new perspectives and more just global policies, if we want to address this problem not with fortresses but with bridges, this is also democracy. We need to review the concept of citizenship as we are building a planetary human being that at the same time is often not considered a citizen of a country. We need to look at human citizenship more then state citizenship for our future democracies. This not only in the US but also in Europe, where after the deaths of so many people, including children, in the Mediterranean Sea during last years, may be Europe will start to think on how to deal with the conflicts, the poverty and the insecurity of the populations of North Africa and Middle East. We need to help those countries to overcome poverty and insecurity but at the same time we need to build real policies for asylum seekers instead of thinking on how to defend ourselves from the ‘barbaric invasions’. We have to stop to accept the illegal immigration as useful to our economic interests because undocumented immigrant cannot be protected by the labor laws.
The only hope we have is that our leaders will start to think more wisely, with longer vision strategies for the international migrations in particular of the youth from the “global south”. Because a democracy that doesn’t consider citizens its immigrants just because they are undocumented is not a real democracy, as the power is not anymore ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’. And a society that abandon its children is not an healthy society but a society that seeds its own devastation. And a civilization that steel the childhood to its children is not a long lasting civilization but a civilization that seeds its own decline. So if we don’t want to see enormous and increasing problems and suffering in our planetary future we need to act in the right direction and act quickly. To think to our future generations means to think to our children today. To their education, empowerment and realization. There is no more urgent issue, neither climate change or terrorism, that is more imperative than build a good and dignified life for our youth in this world. Otherwise the sufferings of today will become the hell of tomorrow. There is no space for indifference: ‘I care’ not ‘mind your business’ has to be the motto of the policies in our Western countries. Like Niemoller taught us during Nazism, if we don’t care today there will be nobody, tomorrow, to take care about us. And if we don’t care about our children today, there will be no adult children tomorrow, to take care about humankind. First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out– Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out– Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out– Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me. (Marin Niemoller)
Documentary “Which way home” (it shows how Central American children use the “death trains” in long exhausting trips to reach the ‘paradise’ of the north) :
Today I want to remember an historic figure to who I look up to as a champion of democracy and humanism, another ‘democratic Florentine’ who emigrated, like me, from Florence to Virginia at his middle age, in order to reflect on the state of democracy in the US and the Western world nowadays.
Filippo Mazzei born near Florence the 25 of December 1730 and died in Pisa the 19 of March 1816, but he didn’t spend all his life in Tuscany. He was an Enlightenment thinker and a philanthropist who after many years abroad, as a physician in the Middle East and a businessman in the UK, at the age of 43 moved to Virginia and became a close friend of Tomas Jefferson. He bought an estate near Monticello and named it Colle, “Hill”, as it remembered him his dear hills of Tuscany. There he cultivated oil, wine and other Tuscan products but he also started to ‘cultivate his spirit’, influencing the spirit of Jefferson too and at the same time the spirit of his old fellow citizens in Florence and his new fellow citizens in Charlottesville. He started to write for a Florentine and a Virginian Gazette about the new values of freedom and democracy that were generating in the British Colonies, with him as an active contributor to that ‘new humanism’.
It is known that Mazzei influenced the future President Thomas Jefferson in the draft of the Declaration of Independence and in shaping some principles of the new Constitution. As some letters to Jefferson conserved in the Archives of Monticello show and also President JFK remembered (Kennedy, John F. A Nation of Immigrants, pp. 15-16) he played a role in shaping the American democratic values with his knowledge of tolerance, freedom and respect of diversity. Besides this fundamental contribution he also spread and publicized the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution in Europe (with translations and presentations) becoming one of the most famous Italo-american patriot. In 1779 he went to Florence and Paris, where for some years he worked as a secret diplomatic agent to purchase arms for the state of Virginia and in 1785 he left Virginia for good, going to France, where he participated to the fervors of the French Revolution and also to Poland, where he became a privy councilor at the court of King Stanislaus II. He wrote a political history of the American Revolution, the “Recherches historiques et politiques sur les Etats-Unis de l’Amerique septentrionale”, and at the end of the century he returned to his country, where he went back to cultivate the land in Tuscany, this time in a small vegetable garden, and write his memories.
Mazzei is remembered as an Italo-American patriot and a fighter for democracy and tolerance wherever he went. This ‘cultural mediator’ had the lucky and the leadership talent to become an active participant to the main political events of the end of XVIII century that would have shape the future of democracy and of the western world as we know it today. But in his memory, and in the memory of all who participated to the building of those ideals it worth to ask today how is the health of those high human democratic principles, both in the US and in general in the Western world: do we currently follow and put in practice those canons of civil life and citizen empowerment today? Or it is needed to go back to those values that shaped American and French constitutions in this period of our history as the Renaissance did with the Roman classics times in order to come out from Middle Age? I think that to help our ‘mature democracies’ to overcome current critical moments we really need to return to the core of the values of democracy, freedom and tolerance, more than two centuries after the draft of those enlightened texts and see how to improve their application. Some scholars in the US, from both left and right political spectrum, are actually calling since some years for a Second Constitutional Convention towards a substantive effort to reform politics in this country. I don’t know if this is what the US need to do right now but for sure the US and the West in general have to reflect on the challenges that its democracies are living today.
Democratic transitions are never fast. The American democracy for example took almost 100 years before the values of the American Constitution would start to be applied to everyone with the abolition of slavery and political equality for African-Americans took another hundred years (with the Civil Rights Act). And a real economic equality still has to happen in our countries, actually today we are experiencing a trend of reduction of it with an increasing gap between rich and poor in the US as well as in other Western democracies. So democracies can also draw back and regress, as the challenges of our ‘mature democracies’ today demonstrates. The rights of freedom, equality and justice are threatened nowadays in the US (from the NSA surveillance to the Guantanamo prison to the block to immigration reforms by the polarized political parties) as well as in Europe (look for example at the citizens exclusion from the decision making on austerity politics that are destroying the economies and the social fabric of countries like Italy, Spain or Greece). So democracy today need to reflect on a more direct participation of the citizens in the Res-publica, the “public thing”, and even if participatory democracy seems a ‘natural law’ of the politics in the future, the path to go towards more grassroots and individual participation without falling in populism or inefficiency seems still long and full of obstacles. We know that democracy is a never ending process, and even if political parties corruption, crony capitalism or economic inequality are often blocking the path of world communities towards better life and more just societies, we also see improvements in the transparency of information and the empowerment of civil society actions.
So from the Virginian motto Sic semper tyrannis come to us today a call, a call for a step forward on the path of democracy, not only to fight against the tyrants but to fight in favor of the citizens, toward a tipping point in which empowered citizens can participate in the construction of better political and social systems in their country, from the West to the East, from the North to the South. Remembering how Filippo Mazzei did, with his Florentine spirit of Enlightenment and his planetary attitude of Humanism.
As Ugo from S. Vittore (a theologian of XIII century) said: “Who finds sweet his own homelandis no more than a tender beginner, who feels every land like his own is already strong, but is perfect only the person for who the entire world is only a foreign country”.
Perfection is only for the saints but at last let’s try to feel sometimes strangers at home…feel that the geography of our mind is not necessary the truth, that democracy in a place can mean arrogance in another, that the points of views matters as cultures do and that moral rules are relatives to tolerance. So here you can read some thought of an Italian man, living currently between the US and Italy, but who traveled for long time and felt at home and stranger in places where he would never expect. Now I feel at home in Virginia, the state of Jefferson, one of the fathers of modern democracy, an American President that taught us the highest ideals of humankind (even if he himself had slaves, deciding to give future generations the burden of solving this savagery). But I consider myself also a citizen of the world and I want to challenge our mindset and mental securities commenting current facts of different parts of the world, but mostly US, Italy and Southeast Asia, where important things are moving up, and trying to give a different perspective from mainstream thought. I will start my first post than with few sentences President Obama said in his State of the Union 2014:
“Our leadership is defined not just by our defense against threats, but by the enormous opportunities to do good and promote understanding around the globe – to forge greater cooperation, to expand new markets, to free people from fear and want. (…) We do these things because they help promote our long-term security (…) And we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay because we counter terrorism not just through intelligence and military action, but by remaining true to our Constitutional ideals”.
We are not in the cold war era anymore as we know, and we understood that national interest, and moreover national security, is not something that can be defined only in absolute terms. How far can go a state in a war against an enemy that is not recognizable as another country for example? Can US security really increase with Guantanamo, NSA surveillance and the Drones attacks or will it be on the contrary reduced? Obviously one thing is the President rhetoric during a State of the Union and another thing are his actions (actually Obama has been criticized exactly for increasing the use of Drones and not closing Guantanamo). But if we look at the international system now (in Middle East in particular with the cases of Syria and Iran) it seems that after failing with the military intervention, and similarly to one hundred years ago, American foreign policy is rediscovering today some spirit of diplomacy like in the Wilson’s times. Also some political analysts belonging to the so called “Realist” school (the one that looks at the international system through the lens of power politics and that have been influencing most of the time the American foreign policy in the past) like John Mearsheimer, are shifting their ideas against the need of hegemony and the acceptance of imperialism (see on this the article of Mearsheimer, “American unhinged”: http://nationalinterest.org/article/america-unhinged-9639).
Also, in the world, other powers are on the rise, in particular China, the “Middle Kingdom”, but also India, Indonesia, Brazil and others. So new approaches to international politics (besides domestic one, with different approaches to ‘democracy’ and democratic values) are opening to the world. This will bring change in the world, more than what we expect now: cultures matter and the future international system will have to take that into account.
So let’s keep searching, exploring and learning from diversity of political opinions and cultures and let’s see where globalization, post-modernity and the democratization processes will bring us. We don’t know where we are directed but we know that we need to reduce the polarization not only in fledgling democracies but in mature ones too if we want to increase the dialogue among conflicting parts. This is the only path for the future of humankind: if we want to harvest peace and democracy we need to plant dialogue and tolerance. To say it with Mahatma Gandhi: “The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree……..We reap exactly what we sow.”
Ad maiora!
An unfamiliar political geography of a 'democratic and modern' world from the perspective of a Florentine man living in Virginia
Democratic geography 