About freedom

The municipality of Vellinge, close to Malmö where I live, has the slogan “Vellinge - where the freedom is a little greater”. That got me thinking.

I once read a letter, from a distant relative living in the U.S. She wrote a little bit about her first impressions of coming there, a few years back.

Here are a few sentences she wrote, as I remember them, translated to English:

“I long for swedish bread, proper rye bread with real taste. The only thing I find here is white bread, and it’s awful and tasteless.”

“They say this is the land of freedom, but it mostly seems to be the freedom to throw your garbage in the middle of the street, without regards for anyone else.”

Now, the thing is, the letter was written quite some time ago. Around 1875, if I remember correctly. She was one of around 1.3 million swedes who emigrated to the U.S. because of harsh living conditions, religious intolerance and many other reasons, during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. My mother is into genealogy research and has a treasure of letters from my ancestors, writing eloquently and vividly about their lives and hardships in the new land.

The first sentence made me chuckle; both of them made me think that some things aren’t that much different today from what they were then. One of the things that is different is Sweden. We’ve become a fairly rich nation since then, and hopefully a much more pleasant place to live.

Still, intolerance is alive and well here. Recently, there’s been the debacle about Vellinge, and the placing of a home for lone refugee children there. Vellinge is famous for two things: being ranked as one of the most desirable places to live in Sweden, and for their governing right-wing politicians taking a hardline approach to taking care of refugees: they want no part of it. In all fairness, they’re not alone among the municipalities of this country to take that stance, but they are the figurehead of that stance, and geographically the one closest to me.

The question of paying for the care of the children is not even an issue: it’s the city of Malmö taking care of that, and the caretaking is outsourced to a private company, as I’ve understood the matter. Malmö just doesn’t have enough housing for the number of children currently seeking asylum, arriving alone, without any family to take care of them.

So the only thing that the municipality of Vellinge has taken a stance on is that they don’t want immigrant children in their town. And it’s not just some deranged decision of a handful of grumpy politicians: the ruling Moderate party received around 60 percent of the votes in the latest election, and for a public town meeting regarding the placing of this halfway house for children, so many people showed up that they had to move the meeting to a bigger venue. According to the local paper, Sydsvenskan, pretty much all of the attendees were strongly against the plans, and local politicians loudly proclaimed to do their best to stop it.

“What about our children”, someone apparently said at the meeting, “what will happen when they meet the foreign kids in the street?”. Yes, so noble of them to think of the children. “They’ll bring crime and disorder, and some of them are probably almost adults, close to 18 years old!”. Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know that it was a house for juvenile criminals, I thought it was refugees. “This will bring the value of our houses down!” - Bingo.

There is no real concern for the “swedish” children of Vellinge in these statements. There is just fear against that which is different, and inability and unwillingness to understand that which is problematic and harder to understand than the rules of, say, golf. It’s just racism.

Now, about freedom. As I stated in the beginning of this post, the slogan for Vellinge translates in English to “Vellinge - where the freedom is a little greater”. It seems to me that it’s mostly the freedom to not see people from a different background, with different and perhaps more painful experiences in their life, pass by your golf course. It’s freedom without regard for anyone else, and it doesn’t leave room for the freedom of others. It’s white bread, devoid of any real substance. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

1. lupe-baranski1 liked this
2. junkwhore reblogged this from emilbjorklund and added:

   I read about that. :/ Disgusting.

3. emilbjorklund posted this