body

This nincompoop from New Zealand was, for some unfathomable reason, allowed to spew his horrible message in a newspaper. While it would be most emotionally satisfying to vent at length about what’s wrong with his arguments, I would instead like to focus on something he mentions in passing, at the very end: The assertion that multiculturalism leads to violence.

I find it quite surprising that such a view can be widespread, but sadly it is. So many countries, including the usually progressive ones of Europe, are having huge problems dealing with immigration.

This is certainly not new. So long at there have been immigrants there have been people who hated them. It just boggles the mind that such is still the case in the 21st century.

Last night I saw a good friend who has been abroad for a while. He is a Croat, and I am a Serb. I’m pretty sure that that means we should try to kill each other on sight. Instead, we reflected on the burden of ethnic guilt and the bipolar nature of the search for ethnic identity. I’d never had such a conversation before, and I was amazed to hear someone else feeling the same way I do. Our people (yes, our people, not our peoples) have a gruesome history, one which we would rather not associate with. And yet, being a Serb or a Croat is not like being Serbian or Croatian – it’s not a citizenship that one can renounce. In some way, our flesh and blood belongs to these ethnic groups. But why? Who decided that?

The question of the significance of ethnic identity is probably one that I will ask myself for the rest of my life, but that’s not the point. The point is that, in the end, my friend and I are just two human beings, who ash themselves the same questions.

I should count my lucky stars for living in Toronto, an island of… I don’t know exactly what to call it, sanity? Isn’t it amazing that I can sit at a table with a member of a “different ethnic group” and share these feelings, and see how we feel the same way?

I would like to think that this is what multiculturalism leads to.