Medway Messenger column, 23rd August 2002: Ashamed Of Racism In Medway
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Medway Messenger column, 23rd August 2002: Ashamed Of Racism In Medway |
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[NB: Although 23rd August was the due date for publication, this article was actually published on 9th August.] It
was the day I was ashamed to be a resident of Medway. I
was walking my dog, and we passed a secondary school. It was lunchtime, and a
group of kids from that school were off the premises for their break. No,
‘group’ isn’t the right word – ‘gang’ is. They
saw a man from an ethnic minority, walking along with his shopping, quietly
going about his business. Here was a target. From the other side of the road
they called out vile abuse against him. An older girl crossed the road and
shouted it in his face. A younger, cowardly boy ran over and kicked the man’s
shopping bags so that they split. I
asked the man if he was OK. He said he was. He turned off in a different
direction from the gang. The
gang, seeing that I had sympathised with him, called out to me to justify their
actions. “We only did it, because he called that girl a bastard,” said the
cowardly boy. Yeah, right – when there was one of him and ten of you, of
course he started it. “He
can only buy his shopping because our parents pay their taxes to support him,”
said another. Like they knew whether he was born abroad or here, unemployed or
in work – and maybe paying his taxes to support many people here on Social
Security. And
what if he was either an accepted immigrant or someone fleeing persecution
elsewhere in the world? No: anybody who is neither white nor English must be a
scrounger, and that to them was enough to justify verbal and physical violence. I
said they didn’t know their History. I got off lightly with that one: they
called me a moron. (That’s me with two more degrees than all of them put
together – I forgot.) But
I was right about history. The actions of these thugs belonged not to a
compassionate society but the Hitler Youth. The Third Reich inflamed passions
against the Jews and other vulnerable groups by claiming they were gaining
economic advantage at the expense of ‘ordinary’ Germans. Within
half an hour of the incident I had faxed the Head Teacher with an account of the
incident. Admittedly it was only a week or so before the end of term, but to
this day I still have not even had an acknowledgement. I
checked the school’s website. As you would expect, these pupils’ actions
clearly contradicted the stated policies of the school. But what price so-called
mission statements, eh? They look nice and shiny, but they only mean something
if they’re put into practice. I wonder whether the school took any action. The
same school hasn’t been slow lately to tell everyone they’ve been awarded
special status as a Performing Arts College. I would rather know they were a
caring institution in the local community after what I witnessed. None
of this is to say that as a society we should accept everyone who wants to
emigrate here, or who claims to be an asylum-seeker. We must be as discerning as
we can of the genuine cases from the fraudulent. But
most of us in the UK are either immigrants or their descendants, if you go back
over the centuries. And only 2% of the world’s asylum-seekers want to come
here. In
the Old Testament, when the children of Israel were promised the land, God also
told them to take special care of the aliens, because they themselves had had
that experience as slaves in Egypt. (The current Israeli Government might do
well to reflect on that.) In
the New Testament, Jesus taught us to love our neighbour as ourselves, and he
redefined the concept of ‘neighbour’. Our neighbour is not always the person
nearest to us – in that sense, ‘Charity begins at home’ is a profoundly
anti-Christian sentiment. Our neighbours are the ones in need, and they can live
anywhere. If
God judges a society by how it treats the weak and vulnerable, then just where
do we stand in Medway?
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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration. |