Modesty please

Publié le 14 Février 2013 par Bertrand Ricque

Catégories : #Opinions

I never publish on my Facebook wall photos of my SO NICE country of origin, testimonies of the perversity of the SO BAD ennemies of my country of origin, extracts of papers pointing how vicious are the ENNEMIES of my country of origin, sentences of the SACRED book of my BELOVED FAITH (MHNBF).

Why ? For two main reasons.

First, this would rightly be perceived as a symptom of nationalism. Nationalism is the seed of wars and the life jacket of weak identities. I believe in the oppposite of nationalism. I thus prefer to write papers about all the nice things I discover abroad that can enrich and complete my corpus of values than to spill my blog pouring a disgusting and pitiful propaganda.

Second, a strong man never shows his muscles. A person showing permanently his muscles, is either aggressive, either permanently under siege. IMHO persons behaving as in my first paragraph are relevant of one of these two situations. I am not aggressive, and I feel very confident about my values and those carried by my country of origin. So I don't feel under siege. Spending ones time defending against (imaginary) attacks is a proof of weakness. The strong never shows his muscles. There is no need. If anybody directly attacks anything in my corpus of values, I question the sources, the reasoning and I even might easily admit that he/she is right. This would in any case weaken my opinion on my country of origin, my values. It would give me the opportunity to adjust them and to thus strengthen them. Because nothing is perfect and no country is perfect, and no values are really universal in their entirety. And even if I want to be sure of them, I have to permanently question them with the possibility that they might be wrong. Otherwise it would be simply blind superstition.

It is a fact that some countries are "better" than others. This depend on the point of view obviously, but let's say as far as freedom, standard of living, etc are concerned. It is of course difficult for persons originating from such countries to permanently hear more criticism than compliments, specially if they origin such a country but live in a "better" country. This could be a good reason for such a feeling of being "under siege". Unfortunately facts are facts and denying them will not solve anything. As well attitudes as described in my first paragraph will proove themselves counter-productive, all the readers being very quickly tired by texts ranging from denegation of reality to false excuses, through false accusations aiming at absolving oneself from his/her responsibilities as a citizen. This of course does not excuse the easy critics of individuals never having spent a minute to understand the deep problems of such countries.

Problems in such countries are first coped with at the level of the problematics themselves, by the countries governement (with more or less success and honnesty) and by NGO (with more or less dedication and interests). This is the obvious way, although not easy.

They can also be addressed at the level of the human. This is not commonly done and few organisations focus on this aspect. Working on humans instead of working on the problematics is interesting. Despite not solving initially any problem, and thus seeming useless, I have experienced that changing the mind of persons help them quickly change their context and solve the problems.

So please, let all of us spend sometime thinking about that and change our attitude and avoid what is described in the beginning of this paper. Stopping weeping, we will become strong. Feeling strong, we will start changing things.