 Spiritual: May 16, 2018 Issue [#8905] |
  Spiritual
This week: The Importance of Being Humane Edited by: Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline  
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We should treat the other with kindness and compassion, but sometimes that seems to go out of the window.
This week's Spiritual Newsletter, then, is all about the importance of being humane.
Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline |
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I don’t know what the political situation is like in your country. I hope it’s better than where I live. When I think about what’s going on around here, I can feel a sense of genuine despair and helplessness.
For example, there are people who moved here with their parents perfectly legally, decades ago. All of a sudden they find themselves threatened with deportation, or actually deported. They cannot remember living in the country of their birth. They have nothing and nobody there. When they arrive "back home", they are considered to be foreigners because of how they dress and speak and behave, and that’s not surprising, because Britain was their home. It is all that they’ve known. They’re often in their 50s and 60s and I cannot imagine trying to rebuild your life at that age and under such circumstances.
There are people who have been the victim of a horrible crime, only to find themselves locked up in a deportation centre rather than offered help or justice. That means that people may now be too frightened to report when something’s happened to them.
From next year, I might be one of those facing deportation. When the United Kingdom officially leaves the European Union, it is not at all certain that someone like me will be allowed to stay. I moved here legally as well, and have lived here for over 15 years. I’ve built a new life here, and I consider this to be my home. On the couple of occasions that I visited the Netherlands – my country of birth – I felt like a tourist. My country of birth has changed, and so have I. It won’t matter where I consider to be my home, however. If I don’t meet the criteria to be permitted to stay – and what these criteria will be is still uncertain – I will become an illegal. If I do get deported, I will have to start all over again, too. I won’t have anyone to stay with, so I may end up homeless. I won’t have a job. Job applications will be difficult because my Dutch isn’t as good as it once was. I think in English. I dream in English. When I think of what life would be like, I can foresee a pretty dark future.
The future is also dark for the poorest people of our country. There’s a new social security system being rolled out that is deeply flawed. People having to apply for it, whether as someone needing social security payments for the first time or if they are switching over from the old system, have to wait weeks, sometimes even three months before their first payment. People needing social security payments often don’t have any savings, so they cannot pay their rent and can face eviction. They cannot pay their bills, so fall into debt. They cannot pay for food...
Some of the people on this system are in work but they don’t earn enough to live off and need top-ups. They are required to look for more work. And once every year, people who are paid every four weeks will see a month where their work will pay them twice, meaning that they earn too much in that one month to receive social security payments, meaning they will have to reapply all over again. The same goes for people on weekly pay – if there are five payments within the month, they too have to reapply.
The system is so complicated that some members of Parliament have tried to navigate it after complaints from their constituents and they couldn’t make sense of it. That means many people fall through the cracks and end up homeless or needing food banks. But to be able to use a food bank you need a voucher, and many people are too far away from where they can get those, or too far away from a food bank in the first place.
In order to receive the social security payments people need to sign a punitive contract, meaning that if they fall even slightly short of the requirements they can be sanctioned for weeks, or for months, not receiving any money. There are people who were a couple of minutes late to a meeting for perfectly good reasons such as attending a job interview, or having a hospital appointment, which they’d notified the job centre of beforehand, and they still got sanctioned. There have been people who had funerals to attend and they were told that if they go to the funeral rather than attend the appointment, they will get sanctioned.
When I think of these things – and many more, so many more – I wonder what is happening to us as a species. I cannot comprehend why we are this cruel to the other. It is as though all logic, and reason, and compassion has been thrown out of the window and in its place we’re punishing the other... for what? For being poor? For having disabilities and/or physical or mental health problems? For trying to live a decent life on a different patch of soil than one was born on?
The United Kingdom calls itself a Christian nation, but I don’t see much Christianity in what I described above. It also has people from other faiths and I am rather certain that Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism etc don’t call for this, either. And my atheist friends don’t back this. Yet, it is happening, and it’s the tip of the iceberg, and nobody seems to be saying enough.
I guess nobody knows how to stop it. I have written to my political representatives, and been given the brush-off. I have published articles in the past and received abuse. I write newsletters like these (sorry) because I have to say something, hoping, perhaps, that someone’s out there listening, hoping that anyone has a clue about what to do.
We cannot treat the other in this manner. We’re supposed to help the other. Be kind. Supportive. We should lift the other up instead of drag the other down.
So... why? I don’t know. I guess I’ll never understand...
Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline
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