Thought rooms being a stranger led me to

Somehow I ended up setting the beginning of this script with a first line about how immigration is seen and dealt with in my country. That was not my point, but since we have a high in both numbers and visibility phenomenon of immigration, I assumed it was an effective way to tell how it is all around. By now anyway, it happens that I am no longer there and in fact I’m an immigrant myself. And why should I made my speech clear for the countries targeted by immigration in the first place, why not to address this text and this thoughts to the strangers themselves?

Back in the days when I was in my hometown I noticed how often and how annoyingly foreign people tend to be always speaking about their countries. It doesn’t help very much to explain the point of your speech, so I’ll save it for when I will be asked to talk about my family and homeland food and sun and stuff that now doesn’t really matter. Sufficient to say that I moved from a European country to another, and that I still do not know whether this makes me a true immigrant or not. It has something to do with what Europe is, and with what immigration is.

People gone from the countryside to the big city looking for a job are no immigrants, and yet they often feel and behave as if. Depending how big the country is, they could not even speak the very same language for example, and have no relatives at all in the new town. European laws in these days, than, allow me to stay here as long as I wish just if I had moved to another sector of my own country and so I’m not so sure anymore to be an immigrant. For sure I can say I’m a stranger in the old school way.

Of this situation I’m happy about the fact of having taken control over the unsatisfying life I was running back home. Everyone moving has its own reasons, reasons I have seen clustered and analyzed by anthropological and statistics surveys, but that remain individual for the ones who have moved. I chose a hard time for my country to abandon it, the crisis hit harsh there and our economical issues are pushing many of my generation to just quit. Numbers talk this way, but among all those I’ve heard speaking about leaving, very few actually did it. In the end, despite the lack of money, the situation is still not so bad to determinate a mass escape and only who sees a personal motivation really goes for good.

My will to leave was indeed much older than this world crisis. For a long time I claimed it to be due to mentality divergences that separated me from my culture, making me chronically feel like a stranger in my homeland. Systems I could not stand, people I did not want to give my energies time and participation. This is when I decided to try different realities, way before to be actually able to leave and even before to see the crisis coming. Getting old I begin to judge those feelings like parts of the process that lead children to see behind the lies and the insignificances of adults’ world, becoming in the meanwhile part of it the further they go. Year after year, while being still happy to have moved, I question my old reasons from different points of view and become aware that this path might eventually bring me to reconcile with my country, somewhere in the future.

A common morale lesson in men’s literature is to work for what’s our and fight for it. This is often emphasized about a man’s rights, freedom, family and identity; similarly, this message often needs some kind of enemy or threat to be carried. A lesson to which I generally agree, but that sometimes gives uneasy solutions in real life. I am fighting for my identity and for building a life of my choice when I leave a country I do not like in order to travel and see the world behind the corner. But when I quit my critical homeland looking for better accommodations and deals, am I not also being selfish?

World politics and personal situations are an intricate tangle. What are the issues pushing young people abroad? Some countries, a few, still have wars running on. Most of the others are just poorer in opportunities and infrastructures than the aimed wealthy lands. None of these is a problems unsolvable for men. No country is lucky enough not to have had famines, plagues, wars or hard times. What brought time to move past it were the people who stayed and kept working, rather than the emigrants. Not an easy life for sure, to stay and face hunger or bad government – but even the immigrant’s life is not that easy, if it’s for that.

Those who stays got to try to stay strong, to lead a normal life like the ones that built up most of human civilization, step by step. Democracy out of oligarchy, railways in place of horses’ trails and the internet for papermail. The products of the progress, which are likely what makes attractive a wealthy country, do not just spread by themselves and every little brick needs to be carried and properly assembled with the surroundings. If I feel my homeland to be poor for whatever it means, and I want to live in a country where everything works just fine (assuming there even is a real one), and then I leave and sit happily in someone’s else living room, then how can I still claim to be so in love with that sun I’ve left back home?

If in that point of the future I was thinking about, when I will may be ready to head back home and finally feel part of my culture, if then I will find myself guilty of all that I have not done what will I say? Has my leaving helped in any way the lax status of my country? I shall feel completely happy with a negative answer only as long as, for that country, I keep not feeling anything at all.