I live among so much news that it is often difficult for me to find out something, because knowing is not the same as realizing. It happened to me days ago, when I heard a child call another child a fag, and that stirred me up as if I didn’t know these things would happen. Of course I know it and I hear it said and I have gone to look at the figures to make sure that the complaints of homophobia have grown. I know that there is a hatred that persists and, nevertheless, I was shocked to hear the specific case of a child, not even in adolescence yet, who He had called another fagot with the will to miss him and hurt him, with the will to corner him. They looked at me, then, surprised that I had been surprised, just fallen from the cherry, but it is that I had just remembered, or surely learned, that knowing is not the same as realizing, for which sometimes it is unfortunately necessary That what you discover happens to you or yours or happens close to you. We have atrophied empathy, which we have confused with sending a few outrage tweets.
I was struck by the fact that that fagot was shouted by someone from a generation that I assumed was already or almost unprejudiced and who, on the other hand, kept alive a world that I knew I was in, because I live in it, but that I imagined in retreat before becoming less intolerant , better. And what goes, there it is, perhaps with the difference that now more is reported and there are more solidarity networks. There it is, latent of course, still permeated in many young people, sustained by those who purposely identify education with indoctrination, who resist talking about a discrimination that escapes in words and gestures that they have decided do not matter because they are childish things. Calling a child a fagot, calling him another, is not a kid thing.
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They looked at me in surprise because it seemed that I had just realized that that world is not scattered and abstract headlines in the press but close realities: the lives of many. That world is us without wanting to, and who knows if wanting, with a comment, a joke in the group of friends, a slip or a misunderstood complicity. What that child did was reproduce the pattern that he observed in his elders and thus confirmed, with one word and nothing more, that everything that has been advanced is little compared to what is lacking and we are not doing it. Or we don’t yet. Or we don’t do too much.
It would be unfair to describe that world, which is ours, without admitting its progress, although staying there would be an understatement. That world is full of macho gestures and fearful women. From early morning wasaps to make sure they’ve gotten home and are okay. Of parties that exaggerate violence out of interest while refusing to name the ones that exist: the sexist or the homophobic. Of young people who believe they have the right to supervise the messages of their partners. Of boys who hit or spit because they walk hand in hand. Of children who find it funny to point to another and call him a fag.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com