Tag: ethics

PRIVILEGE

Yvet Youssef3 Comments

So I get to decide on a whim to travel the globe,
Climb on some pyramids,
Dance til the morning hours in Lisbon,
Wait for a tube on a London platform,
Eat msemen in Marrakesh,
Avec jus d’avocat aux fruit secs – sans amande
Of course (allergies)
I get to travel in and out of North Africa to my heart’s content
(And my heart is kinda needy these days)
This is my freedom for being born North of the Mediterranean Sea
My parents chose these Netherlands over Egyptian soil and I could pay for my passport
With a lifetime of “where are you from’s?” from fellow citizens.
But at the border
My red booklet with golden inscription of this tiny kingdom
Erases all questions
Grants entry with a casual nod from tired agents in funny glass boxes:
Welcome
Welcome
Welcome

So I dance in the desert,
Meet family at Khan el-Khalili for shisha and nànà,
Drift on the waters of the Nile at sunset,
Feel at home in the homes of relatives and friends
Ahlen Ahlen Ahlen ya Habibti!!!
Marhaba
Alhamdulillah!

But when we make plans for those very same family members and friends
To visit the Netherlands,
To eat warme stroopwafels at the Saturday market,
To see their cousin perform music on stage,
To walk along the gorgeous grachten of my hometown,
To talk and laugh in cozy cafes til midnight,
To dance to electronic music in my favorite clubs,
To share my city with them,
We are halted in the imaginary container of nice ideas
Where “Inshallah” does not suffice.

Because even with officiated invitations and detailed descriptions and entirely explicated intentions of travel and family background checks and names and dates of birth and education history and income statements and work records and references and fees upon fees upon some more fees payed and all of this fucking information stacked up in piles at the immigration offices covered in sweat and nerves and goodwill and hope

Their visas are denied

Not enough evidence
Not enough information
Not enough effort ploughing through bureaucratic mazes to be granted
Entrance through the hermetically sealed gates of Europe
And never an accountable human to call and ask
“What the fuck?”
“Why???”

I stare at my passport at the bottom of my travel bag still covered in Sahara sand
And I am flooded with that overwhelming nausea you only get from feeling
Injustice
Viscerally
Shame and guilt and anger arise
That my freedom comes from long histories of violence and oppression
That my passport is a discriminatory document
An official instrument of legal exclusion
Of inequality
Of racist ideology
Of human sickness

And to be honest with you, I don’t know what to do.
I try to call offices where nobody is ever responsible for anything to protest to no avail, and I write it out in long refrain. But I don’t know what to do about this diseased world we have inherited, this sick system nobody seems to have the keys to.

All I know is that globalization is a myth
White supremacy is real
Colonization never ended
And every single freedom we have is tainted
If it is somehow linked to the oppression of others.

The nationstate is a perverted story
Fed to us by the bloody hands of history.
A violence so normalized
We wave flags for it.

How I Became A Vegetarian But More Importantly How We Change Our Hearts And Save The Planet

Yvet YoussefLeave a comment

For 8 years I was in a relationship with a hardcore vegetarian. During most of this time I did not identify as a vegetarian myself, but I cooked mostly vegetarian food in our house, and I respected and understood my partner’s vegetarianism completely. When he decided to also quit eating eggs, I admit I did some huffing and puffing because that seriously challenged my baking and cooking habits, as well as our sweet ritual of sharing meals in restaurants. But then when it came down to it, I couldn’t bear ever baking cookies that he couldn’t also enjoy, so I always ended up using egg-replacer anyway. See, I understood vegetarianism intellectually. It made a lot of sense to me. But I continued eating a hamburger every now and then when I was out.

Until one Summer when I was biting in a hamburger at a local diner, and all of a sudden it tasted disgusting to me. I was chewing on this meat and something about it just felt wrong. This glob of animal parts was (or plural, were…) raised under horrible circumstances and was (were) killed to become this mediocre dish on my plate. I suddenly felt shame and a disturbing sense of decadence. I was chewing on suffering. I was chewing on pain. And I was allowing that degradation into my body. How is that nourishing? It was in this moment that a shift occurred from understanding vegetarianism intellectually, to feeling it emotionally and spiritually. That’s when I stopped eating meat. I have had a couple of meat dishes since in other people’s homes as a gesture of gratitude for their hospitality, but when I get to choose, I always choose meatless options. When asked, I now identify as vegetarian.

It’s an interesting feeling, because once that shift has occurred – once that light switch flips over – you can’t really go back. You can go from unawareness to awareness, but you can’t go from awareness into unawareness again. That doesn’t work. You could go into denial. And there are a lot of ways in which I am in denial when it comes to the choices I make as a consumer in a capitalist society. Our societies are actually based on systems of complete denial, so it’s particularly easy to go along with that current. In fact, we are constantly stimulated to participate in this system of denial with every step we take in this world. Our supermarkets are neatly presented aisles of denial. Our traveling methods are meticulously streamlined networks of denial. Our wardrobes are eclectic messes of denial. Our electronics are such amazingly convenient apparatuses of denial. We are in the thick of it.

Now, I am not writing this because I am preaching vegetarianism to you. If you caught my drift, the idea is that such preaching is fruitless. My point is that knowing something intellectually will never be enough to generate change. This goes for everything in life. We have reached the absolute end-station of the intellect-train. To prevent this train from driving us all straight off the cliff of existence, we need to hop onto the train of emotional awareness. That means we have to personally and collectively look deep into the abyss of planetary suffering, and begin FEELING our actions on an emotional and energetic level. This is scary work. We have made a real mess of things, and it’s extremely painful to bear witness to that reality. But I believe that we can talk about climate change, and sustainability, and ethics, and racism, and sexism, and everything that’s wrong with our world until the end of time (literally…), yet nothing will ever change until we really FEEL it. That means we have to begin uncovering all the barriers in our lives that prevent us from feeling pain, discomfort, grief, sadness, and sorrow. And from that place, we must connect the dots between our personal and our collective suffering.

Changing behavior on the basis of intellect alone is never going to be enough. Emotionally disconnected action, even towards a righteous goal, will not prevail. We need an uprising of emotional intelligence, of open hearts and spirits feeling passionately into the reality that our intellect presents to us. Don’t get me wrong, the intellect is a neat tool. But like any tool, it has no ethical compass. A hammer can be used to build a home and to smash someone’s skull in. Our intellect can be used to build networks of connection and to methodically orchestrate genocide. If anything is going to change our world for the better, it’s going to be that emotional heart of yours, it’s going to be your capacity to really feel pain, to cry, to love. Cultivating, harnessing, and revering emotional intelligence is going to be the next crucial leap in our evolution. And since we are dangling on the precipice of planetary destruction, I’d say it’s about time.