NORMAL LIFE: White Man's Self-Perceived Superiority!

Welcome to the 21st Century. Racism is still as big an issue as ever and, bit by bit, the self-centred white man is losing its superior grip on the world. This was reaffirmed to me on the train on the way to Malmi (of all places) this very morning. I boarded the 8:12 train bound for Kerava and, at Pasila, an Indian woman wearing a sari and bearing a pram with a young child, boarded the train.

As she entered the train cabin, she waved at someone who was apparently sitting behind me. I noticed that the woman seated next to where she was standing looked beyond me, then back up at the Indian woman, an apparently look of disapproval all over her face. Unaware of this, the Indian woman sat next to the disapproving woman and, within seconds, the woman behind me (who was white, by the way) approached the Indian woman, sitting down opposite her, engaging in hearty conversation.

The disapproving woman continued to express her dislike of this meeting of two cultures and if looks could have killed we would all have died on the train this morning. It made me think of a trip to Maidenhead last Autumn to attend a residential training weekend. I got on a packed train at Paddington and, having just returned to Britain after four years in Finland, I was blown away! 'Where are all the white people?', I wondered. As I got off the train, the only white person I saw was the guy at the ticket office. It was like being in a foreign country, with the same familiar signs and miserable Autumn weather as England's.

It's quite unnerving to see how much Britain has changed over the past four years. I don't disapprove of this integration at all because, let's face it, what goes around comes around; with the exploitation of non-whites throughout the centuries, you can't hardly blame non-whites for wanting a bit of payback. Over the next fifty years, as India and China continue to expand their markets, the wealth of the white man will deteriorate and we, in Europe, will get a taste of what it must have felt like to be among the deprived. Quite a scary thought, isn't it?

In a way, I can kind of relate. As a deaf person, I was discriminated against like you wouldn't believe. As a gay person, I can't really participate in society as much as I would like without fear of rejection. And as a foreigner in another land, I accept that I will never be treated as an equal. As ideal as the concept of equality sounds, I hate to break it to you, but it doesn't exist. I should know, after my experiences with my employer last year, which I will cover in a future post. It's scenarios like this that make you wonder what the meaning of life is. Where do we really go from here?