Love and Fear

I have made it no secret how much I love Turku and Finland. The city started to feel like home only a few days after I arrived. But since coming back after a two month stay in the wonderfully diverse Berkeley, Turku has felt a little different and even more so after the events of Friday.

Now, instead of feeling exotically different, I feel like I stick out like a sore thumb. I feel I am unwanted and so I try to avoid attracting attention as much as possible. This leaves little leeway in breaking rules of daily life. I feel I can’t walk in the bike lane, even on accident. I must tread quietly while inside stores or buildings. Doing anything new or different from my usual routine makes me anxious that I will unwittingly do something wrong.

The day after the attack, I told my Finnish friend that I felt afraid of other Finns, realizing that this must be much worse for women who wear hijabs or brown men. An Indian friend said that he felt people darkly scrutinizing him as he walked through the market square. So while Finns are afraid of brown people, we are afraid of them.

But we cannot live in fear.

It is fear that leads us to close our hearts to others. When talking to another foreigner about the incident this week, we brought up the response there has been to the incident. People have immediately rushed to thinking about terrorism and accusing asylum seekers as being the risky population. He pointed out that this response does not give room for any other narrative. The man was from Morocco and so this is immediately the narrative that dominates all explanation.

It is also important to talk about why he may have felt compelled to adapt such views. Because in the end, merely trying to stop people from carrying out such terrible acts is treating the symptom without addressing the underlying disease.

I am watching the city I unexpectedly have begun to hold so dear pick itself back up and return to normal. Yesterday I walked through Kauppatori for the first time since Friday. There is a very large memorial made of candles and flowers, a testament to how big the event was for the country more than for how big it was relative to others around the world. There were Finnish people all around the memorial looking somber but what arrested my eye were the seven Arab men standing in a line on one end holding signs. I didn’t need to read them to know why they were there.

They are afraid. Afraid of how the people in this country will react to people who look like them. But they showed no sign of outward fear. Instead, their signs were all about love. Which is something we could all use a little more of nowadays.