Rant about St Galentine

Valentine’s Day is a tough one.

On the one hand, love is always good and never celebrated enough.  Realistically speaking we all need the occasional nudge to voice our appreciation to the special somebody whose “special-ness” might get neglected in everyday drudgery of work, family and a mountain of dirty laundry.

On the other hand, the whole business is uncomfortably hetero and not a little sexist, suggesting that a woman’s happiness depends on a loving man.  There is an unmistakably “feminine” (in the derogatory sense of the term) whiff of desperation and clinginess about Valentine’s Day.

The resourceful ladies in the feminist movement in the US of A have resolved this conundrum by adopting the cringe-free version: Galentine’s Day, introduced during the second season of Parks and Recreation.  Galentine’s Day is a celebration of that underappreciated virtue that is a woman’s friendship with other women.  There is a misperception that women are all jealous bitches in the workplace ready to trample any ambition seen in their female colleagues and jealous bitches in their private lives pretending to be friends with other women only to try to steal their husbands/boyfriends.  Really, I’m not exaggerating.  Try to think of a few examples of positive representation of women’s relationships with other (unrelated) women in the media and you will draw a blank.  THIS is why Sex and the City was so revolutionary.  (Here is a good recent article on this phenomenon more broadly.)

So hooray to Galentine’s Day.  Because in real life all us lady people are surrounded by numerous other lady people providing us with happiness, support, advice and laughter.  I can tell from professional and personal experience that lady people are GREAT.

But as great as Galentine’s Day is, it is still a bit exclusionary.  Not all of our friends are women and some don’t like the gender binary to begin with.  Really, who cares who your friends are, as long as they provide all the wonderful things that a friend provides?  So Galentine’s Day is an improvement, but it is not quite there yet.

Finnish readers will know by now where I’m going with this, because Finns have solved the whole thing decades ago.  You see, Finns were wary of the icky pinkness of Valentine’s Day from the beginning.  The joke goes like this:

The wife is mooching so visibly that even the husband notices, prompting the compulsory question of “What’s wrong?”  “You never tell me that you love me” the wife responds.  “I told you at our wedding ten years ago, didn’t I?  Well, I’ll let you know if I change my mind.”

So Finns have never celebrated Valentine’s Day in the romantic sense of the term.  Instead, 14 February in Finland (and in Estonia) is Ystävänpäivä (Sõbrapäev) – Friendship Day.  It is a day when we give cards to our friends and hug them and tell them how awesome they are.  What could be better than this?  Not everyone has a “valentine”, but everyone has friends, and everyone loves to tell their friends that they’re great, as well as hear this in return. 

I don’t think the idea is patented or even copyrighted, so feel free to implement it in your countries!

Hyvää ystävänpäivää everybody.

Rant against Democracy

Democracy seems to be in fashion right now.  Not perhaps in all parts of the world (hi there, General el-Sisi), but definitely in the west.  Mind you, not just any democracy: the representative kind is so last century, we want the direct kind. 

Out of the countries I’m familiar with, United Kingdom seems to trot out the direct democracy card every time a thorny EU question comes up, in a wonderful attempt by politicians to wash their hands of difficult decisions (which I thought was what politicians were elected for) and Finland has been the last one to fall head over heels in love with direct democracy.  I’m intrigued to see how long that infatuation lasts, considering how little results you get for all that brouhaha.  In the particularly diluted Finnish version of direct democracy the Parliament doesn’t even have to bring a question raised by a successful citizens’ initiative to a vote.  So far, as far as I understand, exactly zero such initiatives have been voted on.  While the citizenry has been quite enthusiastic about their new found political power, the politicians have been decidedly less so. 

This might just as well be for the better.  I have had the privilege of observing the frontrunner in direct democracy for a number of years now, and my feelings about the whole thing are very mixed.  The Swiss system works, to a large extent, but that might just be because it is Switzerland.  The country and its political system are both quite peculiar.  The Swiss are extremely wary of anyone getting one up over the rest.  There is no capital city, there are four official languages, and the presidency rotates every year among the members of the Federal Council (the Cabinet) – the Council itself being the official Head of State.  Try THAT at home...

As far as direct democracy is concerned, it is very real: Anyone can introduce initiatives to either reject laws passed by the General Assembly, or force the country to adopt new ones, including amendments to the Constitution.  Many cantons, including Geneva, also permit referendums at the local level.

This can actually be quite tiring.  Although there are sometimes sensible initiatives to get at least the conversation going on issues that are important to the population but less attractive to politicians, in its more usual form direct democracy permits special interest groups to hijack the national (or local) discussion with their niche interests.  The system also demands a lot from the population.  There is a vote going on about once a month on one initiative or another, and the issues are rarely straightforward.  Most people just don’t have the patience to inform themselves of all the relevant aspects of a given question, which leaves the door open to knee-jerk decisions based on first, often emotional, impressions.  This unfortunately also shows.  The streets are always full of posters urging people to vote one way or another on a given issue, and the message, when given in a single picture with a few sentences, is rarely nuanced.  Most of the time it is cringe-worthy, even on issues with which I agree. 

The easy example is of course immigration.  UDC/SVP, the local right-wing party (think Front National in France, UKIP in Great Britain or Perussuomalaiset in Finland), at regular intervals brings one anti-immigration measure or another to a vote, just to keep the issue perpetually on the agenda.*  The garishness of this really hit me when my friend J, who is Jewish, remarked drily upon getting off the train from Paris that the posters around the Geneva station is what Berlin must have looked like in the 1930s.  Ouch.  Here is an example of a poster that the citizens are currently being bombarded with, as yet another UDC initiative to reduce immigration is coming to a vote:

As I said, hardly subtle.

So before you ask for more direct democracy, ask yourself whether you want to spend a lot of time educating yourself about complex political issues almost every month, as opposed to once every 4-6 years (when general elections are held).  Ask also whether you would want to have the political discussion dominated by emotive questions pushed by groups obsessed by marginal issues.

Political activity and interest is good.  The two times I’ve personally witnessed political excitement were in Kenya when the first post-Moi election was held in late 2002 and in Paris in the run up to the 2007 presidential election.  What seemed to electrify people was real choice, and potential real change.  This never appears to happen in countries like Finland where there is a wide coalition in power no matter what one votes or United Kingdom where the majority of parliamentary seats are always safe in a first-past-the-post system.  But nor does it seem to happen in the queen of direct democracy, Switzerland. 

The key does not seem to be lots of opportunities to impact the little things, but an occasional opportunity to have a real say in the big things.  Sometimes less democracy can be more.

Or do you disagree?

*Switzerland on the whole is a very open, pro-immigration place, which I must mention in case anyone suffered from a bout of holier-than-thou snootiness as a result of that poster.

Rant about Racist Christmas

It would be mildly put to say that we have “moved on” since my childhood on some of the most overt issues regarding racism.  I don’t know if you have similar examples from your countries, but at least in Finland we kids happily played a card game in which the loser was the one with “Black Pete” (Musta Pekka) in his hand when all the other (white) characters had been united in their families.  Black Pete had no family.  While we played this game we may have been munching on a weird sticky biscuit/candy concoction called “nigger kiss” (neekerinsuukko).  My favourite was the strawberry nigger kiss.

While I cringe writing down these examples, the crowning moment is thinking about the little snot-nosed me standing in the middle of the school yard and shouting “WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BLACK MAN?” while all the other kids run away from me (the black man) screaming.  Because that is of course what kids should do when they see a black man.

Honestly.  This all happened.  Not that long ago.

But at least kids in Finland no longer play “Black Pete” or “who’s afraid of the black man” or eat nigger kisses.

Which is why I was so unprepared to find to my embarrassment and horror that a Finnish Christmas tradition that in my mind clearly belongs in the same camp as the examples above was still going strong last year at least.  It is a little play and it is called “Tiernapojat” (a version of Star boys’ singing procession).  It features four boys (it is played by children of course) who act out the scene in which King Herod is told about the birth of Jesus.  One of the characters is called “Murjaanien Kuningas” (King of the Moors).  Not only does this character not do much else except kneel before King Herod (don’t ask me what this has to do with the birth of Baby Jesus, I have no idea), but he is played by a white kid with his face painted black.  Yeah, that’s right.  A white kid in blackface kneeling before another white kid.  This is how we celebrate Christmas in Finland.

Last year I saw on TV this play being put on at a school somewhere in Finland and I hit the roof.  I hit the roof so hard I immediately started ranting at my mum and dad who were in the room.  In addition, I was so agitated, and so unprepared for my parents’ reaction (=they thought this was a totally innocent Finnish Christmas tradition) that I can’t pretend to having made a particularly coherent argument.  I mostly just screamed at my parents, although they obviously had done nothing wrong.  After a while they got annoyed and started screaming back at me.  So it was all very merry at our little Christmas party!

I still can’t get over it, though.  Earlier this month I was obsessively scanning the Finnish media for signs of awakening to how racist this whole thing is.  Nothing.  Not a peep.  Instead, the main newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported recently on the Dutch beginning to consider the racist implications of their Zwarte Piet tradition – and at no point did it cotton on to the reporter that maybe there were some parallels to be drawn with our own blackface tradition.  Oh, the irony.  At least the Dutch version brings presents as opposed to KNEELING before a little white dude!

Please somebody tell me that we’re not alone in this, that other countries have similarly embarrassing remnants of some racist crap from decades ago to which everyone continues to be blind...?!?

On a more positive note, I thankfully heard nothing about Tiernapojat around this Christmas, so ours was a lot more peaceful than last year.  I hope yours was too!

Hints to Santa

For logistical reasons we celebrated St. Nikolaus as a sort of “pre-Christmas” with the German side of the family this year and exchanged presents already then.  I got from my in-laws a piece of paper, rolled and tied with a very nice ribbon.  Inside it told me that they had made a donation to the MSF Syria fund.

This pressie was one of the best I have ever received.  It made me incredibly happy.  It still does.  Many charities now provide the option of giving an “alternative” kind of present, namely buying cows, trees, chicken, school books etc., mostly in developing countries.  I have received some of these in the past and they have never been a bad gift, it’s always better to give something like that as opposed to something material which I probably don’t need.  But they’ve not been like this one.

The reason is that this was personal.  This was not just a generic “do something good” gift.  It was specifically for me.  It was something I care passionately about.  

Having had such a strong reaction to it, I decided to throw the idea out there more generally.  When pondering what to get various family members and friends, how about expanding your search to not just gadgets, food or books that they might enjoy and think about issues or causes that they care about?  An example: F feels very strongly about the rights of refugees and asylum seekers and has devoted large amounts of his time to helping them both in Germany and here in Switzerland.  Recently he has been dropping hints that HEKS/EPER offers some gifts tailored at assisting these very people. 

Not that I’m referring to anything specific, nobody can guess what Santa might bring in his sack...  If anything at all for that matter.  It all depends on whether you have been naughty or nice.  (The Santa's-little-helper-jury is still out on you, F.)

Merry Christmas everybody.

Rant about Domestic Gods

Feminism makes some people – both men and women – a bit queasy.  There is this inherent fear of “man-hating” behind this reaction, that promoting WOMEN must mean pushing down MEN, as if it is some kind of a zero-sum game.

The latest craze in feminism seems to be about allaying these fears by reminding everyone that feminism isn’t only about women’s rights, it’s about men’s rights too.  Men don’t really need to have their rights promoted (by women) in the corridors of power, so the troops are marching to battle to promote men’s rights in the one sphere where women still dominate: the home.

The most notable thing about this movement is that it is driven by women.  I see the cunning in the argument:  Anne-Marie Slaughter’s widely publicised views on the structural blocks to (American) women combining work and family become less threatening, and she appears smarter and her views more acceptable, when she follows them up with an impassioned plea for the rights of men to have a say in the home.  It’s OK, she is not a man-hater after all.  Similarly Riikka Venäläinen, the Editor-in-Chief of the biggest Finnish newspaper, decides to celebrate Father’s Day with an editorial about the need to treat fathers as equal parents with equal rights (and presumably equal duties, although she is less clear on that).  She is a woman in a man’s job, I understand that she must get the boys on her side, and some of her earlier writings, hinting at feminist views, must have caused a stir.  This piece was a good counterweight.  

I’m sure you’ve all seen other examples of similar writings in recent months, as they have proliferated in the media.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these ideas – most of them are in fact very good.  But what I don’t get is why it all has to come at the expense of blaming women.  Here’s Ms Slaughter:

“You know, women are hypocrites this way, because we would go crazy if men treated us in the workforce the way we typically treat them at home – if a guy in the workforce assumed he was more competent than you are, and told you what to do – but that's the way most women treat men in the household.”

While men sometimes have specific gripes about their own spouses (which is all entirely normal, at the end of the day it is for each family to decide how they handle their own domestic arrangements), they do not seem to be getting up in arms and blaming the womenfolk in general for keeping them down and preventing them collectively from having a say in domestic decisions.  So why do women do it?  As if most women don’t carry around enough guilt about trying to be perfect employees, bosses, mothers, wives and a thousand other things as it is.  They clearly need the extra guilt, heaped on their heads by other women, that they are preventing men from blossoming into domestic gods.

Come on ladies.  We can do better than this.  Just like feminism is not about hating men, let’s not make it about hating (other) women either.  Let’s remember who the real enemy is.*  The enemy is the patriarchy, the structures that prevent equality from being achieved in any and all spheres of life. 

 

*For those who recognised the quote: yes, I’m ridiculously excited about the new Hunger Games movie.  Almost as excited as I was about Two Towers back in 2002.  The trailer already passed the Bechdel test!

Rant about Gypsies

Here are three recent stories from real life:

Story A: Two colleagues are watching a newscast.  The newsreader is talking about the plans of the Italian government to evict (mostly Romanian) Roma from their illegal settlements.  The younger one wonders out loud how this can happen.  The older colleague mentions casually that it is the only way to do policing in Europe.  He knows because his wife works in law enforcement.  “Gypsies” are sought out and targeted, because they just are much more likely to be criminals.

Story B: A mixed bunch of hockey players, from young teens to 42-year olds, are getting off their bus outside a rink.  The coach tells them not to leave anything valuable on the bus.  When one player asks “why not”, the answer, given with a smirk, is “because there is a Roma convention taking place in the building next door”.  A few players giggle a little, and all file out of the bus and head for the rink to prepare for their match.

Story C: A team of football players is out on the town after a victorious tournament.  Loud, boisterous behaviour and drunken antics are accompanied by approving laughter and backslapping.  At one point the teasing is directed at one player, M, and a well known football chant which translates as something along the lines of “M is a gypsy” gets on the way.

This sort of casual racism against the Roma (or Romani*) happens all the time, everywhere, on our presumably modern, civilised continent.  While we mostly understand and abstain from overt racism or other forms of crass discrimination against other minorities, the same rules don’t seem to apply when it comes to the Roma.  I was channel surfing the other day and was pretty shocked to come across a reality TV show on English TV that was called “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding”.  Apart from the fact that the TV company had thought it OK to use the derogatory term “gypsy” in an attempt to draw a humorous parallel with the hit play and later movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”, the content continued with the racist theme.  I watched it for about 20 minutes out of some kind of morbid fascination to discover that the bride-to-be looked and acted like a pretty standard English “bridezilla” who has lost a few marbles in the planning of the impending nuptials, but somehow this was all made to sound like it was due to the fact that she was Roma.  And this was all happening on national TV!  The mind boggles.

Casual racism is not rocket science, so if we wanted to stop it, we would.  There is a very simple test to find out whether a stereotype about the Roma is acceptable or not:  Just replace the word “Roma” or “gypsy” with “jewish” or “black”.  If this makes you squirm with discomfort, well then what is being said is racist, whether it is intended as such or not.

But the problem is not just that we casually make such remarks.  It is made much worse because we tolerate them.

Which one is the odd one out of my three stories above?  Story C. 

Stories A and B happened to me.  I was listening to the racist remark in A and the racist joke in B, and said nothing.  In story A I should have told my boss that finding out that this sort of racial profiling is conducted openly by the Swiss police sends shivers down my spine, and not least because it is against the European Convention on Human Rights.  In story B I should have told my coach that I find making racist jokes, especially in front of impressionable teenagers as young as 13, entirely inappropriate.  Instead I shut up.

Story C happened to my other half F.  He challenged his loudmouth drunken football buddies, telling them that this sort of casual racism was just not ok.  Some protestations ensued, a few players defending their actions by saying that it was harmless football banter.  F was having none of it, telling them that racism was never harmless and football should move away from using such chants.  To their credit his buddies listened and took note.  Several constructive conversations about casual racism directed at the Roma have taken place among the team members since.

I just hope that when these situations occur in the future, and they will occur, since the Roma will continue to be the most discriminated minority in Europe for a long time, I will have the courage to act more like F and less like me.  I can’t stop the Italian (or Finnish, for that matter,) police from evicting the Roma from their makeshift camps, nor can I ensure that Romania (or other countries) do not discriminate against Roma children in isolating them from “normal” children and giving them substandard teaching in separate classes.  But what I can do is point out these small, casual, acts of racism, and make these very smart and nice people see what they’re doing, and thus make them perhaps think twice next time.  I will report back on the first occasion I manage to put my own advice into action.

*Romani is the more technically accurate term, since Roma are a sub-group of Romani, but I've stuck with Roma, as it is widely used to denote all of the Romani.

Rant about the 2 million

My guess is that you’re bored of hearing of Syria.  Pictures and stories about the chemical weapons, the Islamists that are taking over the democratic revolution, the bulging refugee camps and the frustrating diplomatic wranglings feature in the media every day, but we’re bored and have kinda stopped caring.  Same old, same old ... lots of cruelty and misery, we know.  Moving on.

And that is the real tragedy.  I was just a little bit too young to really grasp the context, history and development of the Rwandan genocide, which has given me the presumed moral superiority of being able to shake my head at the humanity of my youth and just wonder “how on earth did the previous generation let Rwanda happen” with the obvious implication that we’re better people now and if MY generation had been old enough to understand, the genocide would never have happened.

I don’t have that luxury now.  I’m old enough to get what’s happening, and I’m watching it happen.  When my future kids ask me 25 years from now in their moral righteousness how the hell could my generation let Syria happen I will have very little to say.

If you’ve not gotten too bored, but have at least read this far, let me assure you that I’m not talking about bombing.  I may have opinions on what should or should not be done on the diplomatic or military level, but neither my writing about that nor you reading my ranting is going to change anything.  What I want to focus on is what you or I can actually do, and that has to do with the human tragedy that is unfolding on a mind-boggling scale.

There’s more to this war than guns and tanks and sarin and fighters of all creeds and unimaginable acts of cruelty.  There’s the lack of hospitals to treat the wounded or ill and there are the squalid and overflowing refugee camps with 2 million – let me repeat that number – TWO MILLION people who are getting bored and frustrated when not being bought or abused.  When we want to act to help those that are suffering, we can and do.  Donations for the survivors and rebuilding after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami reached US$ 10 billion.  I wonder how much that money would do in the camps in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.  The refugees could not only have food and shelter, but schools and hospitals and small businesses to start getting people back on their feet and earning their keep.  This would not just alleviate immediate suffering, but increase the chances that the people will be mentally and physically fit to return to rebuild their country once the atrocious war is finally over.

There are plenty of organisations that have not been waiting for the US and Russia to be done with their diplomatic posturing and chest pumping to DO SOMETHING about the humanitarian crisis.  Medecins sans Frontières for example runs clandestine hospitals inside the country.  Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organizations is a collective of Syrian (and Syrian origin) medical organisations and professionals providing and co-ordinating medical aid.  Lots of the big, traditional guys such as UNICEF and Red Cross/Crescent work inside the country as well as in the camps.  The UNHCR obviously tries to run most of the show in the camps, and is chronically underfunded.  Smaller organisations, such as Kirkon Ulkomaanapu in Finland or Caritas in Switzerland, also do their bit.  If you don’t want to part with your cash, Amnesty International in the UK, for example, is running a campaign to pressure the government to do more to help the refugee crisis.

Please let’s not get jaded and callous about this, but do whatever small thing we, as individuals, can.