Remember the Fresh Prince of Bellaire? Chicago slum kid in
trouble with local gangs gets chance to live with his rich uncle in Hollywood?
How we laughed at his streetwise antics in the sober middleclass household. He
was bright, lively and they were accepting and supportive, and they all lived
happily together except for his cousin Carlton who couldn’t get laid. It was
all a perfect solution to his problem; just leave the overcrowded poverty and
life threatening violence of his home for the sunny suburban pastures of
southern California. Luck for him it didn’t include a boat ride. Lucky for them
he didn’t have eight hundred brothers and sisters in the same situation. I
don’t know if the program was aired in North Africa but it looks like it as
many thousands flee the hunger, poverty and violence of Libya, Chad, Syria and
Niger etc for the relative opulence of Europe. Whilst it’s true that much of
the violence and poverty in Chicago and North Africa is self-inflicted external
factors of depravation and exploitation are the root causes. Corruption, both
local and multinational, governmental, sectarian and corporate can reduce a
region to its knees and provoke a bitter, angry brutality, a winter of discontent,
from which all but the brutal must flee. Fine if it’s Will Smith on his own but
100,000’s? With brutality now endemic in the Middle East and North Africa they
could double the European population and destabilise us too. We can’t order the
various factions to be nice to each other and we can’t pump in aid because it
would be used to support the brutal. It seems to me comfort at least allows
reflection and tolerance where extreme hardship fosters hardened beliefs, which
in turn foster conflict. My only solution is to create oases in the heart of
these regions necessarily defended but acting as beacons of ‘how life could be’
with cooperation, goodwill and honest governance and hope that they act as an
antibiotic to this disease of brutality. I guess it’s the ‘good guy in the
ghetto’ approach; he can change beliefs.
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