Cement, Wire and Blood

You don't know me yet you fear me. I've never done anything to harm you, to wrong you, yet you hate me. And why? Is it my religion that scares you so? The language I speak? The place of birth on my passport?

The monstrous notion of me you have in your head is nothing like me. I am not a country, I am not a nation, I am but a man. Just like you, I want to enjoy a setting sun, a rising moon and the break of dawn. Just like you, I want to love and be loved. Just like you, I want to live.

You look at me and see a stranger, a foreigner, a man with no land. I look at you and see a confused man, a man who believes whatever he is being told simply because the truth is too complicated.

I click my heels three times and say, “there's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home.” But I know no magic can bring my home back to me. My home is no longer a home. It is a battlefield, a scorched soil, a mass grave.

Ever since I was born, all I had been doing was struggling to survive, struggling to protect my tender sanity. Where I come from, if you don't have a good pair of legs to carry you away from the danger, you die. Simple as that.

Your suspicious eyes examine me from the other side of the barbed wire fence, contemplating whether to let me in or not. But no cement nor wire can separate us. A trail of blood flows between us, connecting us to one another. It is the blood of my murdered brothers, of my murdered sisters, that flows uninterrupted throughout the world. You close your eyes, you can't see the blood. It is too far away from you. It has nothing to do with you, or that's what they tell you.

I don't know you, yet I want to be like you. I want to have your beautiful childhood memories instead of bullets and rockets flying over my head. I want to dream the childish dreams you used to dream as you slept in your warm bed, instead of hearing the cries and the screams pierce the night. I want to have your false sense of safety. I want to dare and picture a future, my future.

I don't know you, yet I fear you. It isn't you I'm scared of, but rather your oblivion to the power at your disposal. You, who could either be my savior or doom me to a fate far worse than you can possibly imagine.

Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads to death. Nothing is easier than to give in to hatred. It takes every good piece of land, every good piece of heart still beating within us, and corrupts them, devours them to the bone. Ignorance, and fear, and hatred push us to eventually take the lives of others, who aren't ours for the taking.

I don't know you. You don't know me. Let us know each other. Let us leave no room for hatred. Let us change that, please.  

*Photo: https://pixabay.com/en/barbed-wire-fence-secretion-539806/