The Twin Towers. Charlie Hebdo. The Bataclan. Nice. Covid-19. Samuel Paty. The climate crisis. The list is incomplete.
Like a nail struck crookedly beneath the weight of a hammer, we have buckled under the impact of successive, traumatic shocks that have struck our societies all too often.
Consciously or otherwise, we are afraid. And so, like a parent grieving the loss of a child, unable to find their way back to life, we gradually slip towards darkness.
Erasmus, birthright citizenship, Jewish, Muslim, foreigner, globalization, international law, otherness, solidarity… so many words that now resonate as sources of disturbance, rather than remaining sources of enrichment.
We forget that only light can heal us. And we listen to those who tell us that the other is the problem: the unemployed, the entrepreneur, the foreigner, the civil servant.
We forget that light is won through courage, by overcoming adversity with bold solutions. We forget to believe in otherness—the kind that builds.
We forget that our interdependence requires us to discern, behind the complexity of the world, the transformations we must undertake, however painful they may be.
And slowly, we become grief-stricken, paralysed, giving up the dream of a better future. So… what should we do? Accept. And be reborn.
