PES Manifesto

Isabella Frenning: On life-changing experiences

Publié mercredi 23 avril 2008 à 09h30
par Isabella_Frenning dans Démocratie et diversité européenne (vu 339 fois et 1 commentaires)

Once in a while we experience something that either changes the way we see the world or broadens our view of it. The most significant events do both.

I had one of these experiences on my ninth birthday; I know that millions of others did too. My birthday is the 9th of November…Admittedly, the massive importance of the fall of the Berlin Wall probably only dawned on me a few days later, when my spontaneous bitterness of being completely ignored by my family in favor of the much more interesting TV-news slowly started to fade. To this very day I’m actually still trying to figure out what that specific event has really meant to all of us. I guess many of us still struggle with that question. But since social development is dynamic rather than linear or static, I guess the impact of that event is ever changing. (Being a student of the political sciences, I must admit I’d sometimes wish there could just be a logic and simple answer to these questions like in the mathematical sciences - but of course the complexity is also part of the beauty, no?)

Even in more recent times this significant event on a cold November night in Berlin is vigorously quoted as a symbol of a new era for Europe (And if you follow the link, I should be the first to wish that this very speech had been given by this guy instead).What I did realize back then was, however, that we are all part of something much bigger than just our local community or our nation state. With the naïvely clear logic of a nine-year old, I remember thinking ‘That could have been me. That could have been my friends and my family living there. How can the world be so unfair, that only chance decides what possibilities we get?’ I realized, that I might be a Dane, but that I certainly am a European too (more about that issue to come in later blogposts).

I’m not quite sure how noble a selfish starting point for analyzing living conditions in other countries really is. I must say, however, that it sure is quite effective in order to determine whether we just should ignore things or act on them. If we wouldn’t accept living under poor conditions ourselves, we should never accept that others do so either. This approach of course has the rather obvious bias that the conclusion ‘we need to do something’ can usually be drawn already before any analysis is made - but if doing nothing is the alternative, I’m willing to accept that bias any day.

Thank you for the honor of being blogger of the week – I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you for the week to come.

Tags: blogueur de la semaine, citizens