I’ve been thinking a lot about respect

At Ter Apel, if someone asks me if I have any bread, I don’t ask questions. I answer honestly, and I share. Nobody judges you for scarfing dry bread out of a bag, or saying “I’m so hungry” when what you mean is, “I have not had enough to eat. I have no food. I need to go ask the Dutch for a handout.” Not “where do you want to eat dinner, Thomas?” Just hunger.

The Dutch are firm, and there are rules. But if you go to them and say, “I’m really hungry, I didn’t eat yesterday and I can't get any food today,” they’ll feed you. They won’t hassle you about it.

Everyone here knows exactly how precarious all of us are. Nobody is being shitty to other people. There are plenty of people being rude, or playing loud music, or being insane, but nobody is saying “I fucking hate you because of the t-shirt you’re wearing.” I live in the queer housing. Everyone knows who the queers are. We all live together. And we can’t hide any more than anyone else can. And nobody is being shitty about it.

Virtually nobody here speaks anyone else’s language. You meet a person in the camp, you’re going to have to work it out some other way. You have a small community of people you know and maybe trust, because they’re your neighbors or you came here with them. But it’s rare to meet someone you can even talk to.

And it fucking works. This place is fucking dire, and it has problems. But hate and aggression aren’t the problems.

Even if you hate queers—and yeah, I get sideways looks from Muslims, and COA has told me to be careful who I hang out with and where I go—think about it. If you’re Muslim and you’re here, and you feel hatred towards a visibly queer person, how long can that thought survive in your head before you remember where you are?

You reach into that familiar back pocket for the power you’re used to. You expect support, validation, backup. And you come up empty. There’s nothing there. No one’s going to back you up. Nobody here rewards that hate. And in that moment, you remember: we’re both here for the same reason.

That doesn’t erase the aggression. But it strips it down. Makes it impossible to pretend it’s righteous. If you're being shitty to someone here, you are alone.

I’m wary. But I know, and they know, that we have more in common than we have differences. And when you live here, you can’t avoid knowing that. Not abstractly. In your body.

Because you’re here. It's barbed wire fences and security and "can I see your papers?"

This is the only place on Earth you can be.

And if that’s true, how can you hate someone? You can't. Hate is a luxury of the powerful. And you're here.

So it seems to me that respect is possibly a default position among groups of people because we are all squishy and vulnerable and we inherently rely on one another for safety and sustenance. And I don't think that hatred can exist without power, without the feeling that you're better than someone. That condition, of believing in your own righteousness and value over someone else, is both taught and emergent from social systems that, by definition, must be unequal and biased.

It troubles me that I mention Muslims by name as a group above. But it's also truthful: there are just more Muslims here than Christians. And the fact of the matter is, back in the US, the majority of the hate I got was from Christians. Without going into the theology and morality of this extraverted hatred and aggression in a religious context, it's very clear to me that religion is not the source of this, outside of the education (= indoctrination, orthodoxy) that occurs in religion. This aggression comes from two things: power and inequality.

It thus follows that societies which go out of their way to increase equality (vs just declaring that all men are created equal and leaving it at that) and reducing power imbalances (vs denying they exist with national exceptionalism and bootstrap narratives) will necessarily also reduce hatred and aggression. This isn't to say that people who are rude or have mental health issues will not exist and it will be daisies and bunnies and rainbows, but there might be less murder, poverty, and despair.

So this naturally leaves me wondering, why would anyone, or indeed an entire nation, specifically aim to reduce efforts at equality? To preserve and indeed exacerbate power imbalances and social stratification?

The answer seems obvious to me: the only reason this makes sense in an economy of safety and social capital is it preserves, conserves, and increases power in those who already have power. Hatred is an incidental consequence of this, and it serves to bolster power. But I don't think I believe anyone is actually hateful without an incentive that arises only in a society which rewards it.

And I've seen it broken in front of me. I've seen echoes of hatred and aggression turned to self conscious acceptance. In a place where nobody has anything, let alone power.