THE FEAR OF WHAT´S DIFFERENT

Today I remember to look for a place to fix my apple because something like a month ago I started some video blogs on youtube, but because of my computer malfunction I wasn’t able to do the editing I was in mind to, so I gave up the idea for while but that brought me to this article which is the same subject of my videos on youtube and a very close reality for me as a person, and that is call “immigration” something very familiar to me, to our grandparents and probably to anyone in some level in our globalized world .When I first came to this country i didn’t really had any idea about what I was putting myself into it, I think that´s why immigration is something more usual for the young, because youth is what you need to go through all the situations that only a foreigner can go through.

If you come from a third world country like me, you can actually double the challengers that you may find on your path, mostly caused because of the same issue that brought us the second war, or all the wars for the matter, it’s called “Fear of what’s different”

For the same reasons men fight against people from different races, different sexual preferences and religions, the same happen to foreigners. Normally what people can’t understand they label, labels are the way our society found to differ people from each other.

So, in the same way there no all Japanese good in math, R&B is not only enjoyable from black people and gay parents can raise straight kids, I don’t like samba, be on the beach and surprise surprise there is white people in Brazil.

One day during one of my English classes in 2001 my teacher asked how much high fashion it will cost in our countries and how people dress over there, everybody said their part until comes the turn of the Brazilians one in the class, so my classmate from North of Brazil decided to tell that in Brazil there is not such of thing of high fashion because everybody just walk around with shorts and sandals! I choke and didn´t work I tell everybody that wasn’t true; after all it was someone from my own country who said that!

What they didn’t know is that guy used to live far away from the major city in North of Brazil, in a very rural style small village close to the beach and never travel in his own country, coming straight away from his village to one of most cosmopolitan cities in the world, he was a boy that grew up practically without television and modern commodities and thought that his entire country was the same.

What I mean is, the way you perceive the world it will depends of your own world, to try to understand the new we always try to associate with something that we already know and when this does not happen is when we got scare and scared people tend to be very scary.

Stereotypes is something created from the public imagination but is also feed from the cinema and television, have you notice that American shows tend to glamorise their lives? Full of air bag blondes and hunk guys, Britain is perceived from movies like Notting Hill and four wedding and one funeral, but countries like mine are only show in the media when something terrible happen over there, there is not much interest in show the good bits, even our filmmakers realised that and only our most violent movies has a chance to a Oscar nomination, making myself answer stupid questions like: “ What you do to protect yourself to get shot on the streets?” “Can you go walking from your city Sao Paulo to Amazon?”

So for my surprise since I start to travel around the globe I realised that the Americans girls are not all Barbie Dolls, maybe the ones in Beverly Hills, but in the rest of the country the greasy fat food took over the waists and minds of the youth, in England nobody drink the five o’clock tea anymore, and that beautiful British accent full of high educated manners of lords and dukes from the movies are something that you may only see if you are from the royal family, because on the streets and in the real life what you see is a increase of a generation of people that practically did not went to school ,speak dreadfully their own language and rely their survival from the government money.

Is funny how even after what Hitler did years ago, still kind of easy to manipulate the masses in the world just using the power of suggestion and the media, with the right direction your favourite tv show can make you desire the Farah Fawcett hair but also can make you want your Mexican neighbourhood dead! Is not enough live in a Globalized world, we need globalized our minds too!