My clock keeps the time. He is a loyal partner and is also an image of beauty that was made known and sharing during my stay in Damascus, which lasted for eight days.
There I found peace. I found tradition. I found beauty. I found sensitivity. I found culture. I found tolerance. I found appreciation. I found hospitality.
There were old stones ordering beautiful sensations. There were small corners surrounding wide stays open to the visitor. There were paths that led to the rest of the shadow and the encounter of the light.
And, everywhere and at all hours, there were people who enjoyed stopping my step to stay talking to me about the life and fate of those who live it.
I fell in love with Syria. I fell in love with the Syrians.
I met them and accompanied me. They invited me. They told me. We laugh together. We invent words. We play to recognize ourselves from our differences. We became friends.
The Syrians. People like me. Friends of those who reached their country and their place. Happy to be able to offer you a welcome. Unable to a desert. Proud to share its essence. Moderate defenders of his truth. Great conversters. Generous.
I returned from Syria and spent months talking very well about everything I had shared there. I told everyone I will return, I want to return.
However. Now I feel guilty. I feel unable. Worse than a barbarian. I feel a traitor.
I have been removed the possibility of saying that I don't want anything to be done in the cruel way that is being done. They have left me empty of real and effective rights. And the faces and reasons of the people who intend to speak for me hit my conscience. Decide for me.
I do not want. They can but I don't want to.
I don't want them to talk to me. That silence my protest. Let my right to understand what they do not understand. That impoverish poverty. Let them deny space to life. Let them turn back to the pain that hurts. They are ashamed with their predictable reasons.
The Syrians. Refugees. Those undessed invaders who have been fleeing from the last war that the world has manufactured. Holding their children with one hand and their pain with the other. Unable to understand the refusal to the goodness that hits them. Unable to understand the refusal to the space they request. Unable to accept the refusal to the real right to his life. The repeated refusal that damages their soul and breaks their hearts.
I do not want those men, women and children to try to avoid how it is avoided to the unwanted. Why do they flee from their homes? Who put them in that place of abandonment? Who took them out of their homes and threw them into the void? Where does your distressing Odyssey begin endless? Who is the real culprit of his pain and death?
What if one day we? What if tomorrow or our children? What if it is in our destination to flee to the desperate looking for a refuge, a friend, a gesture of love?
Then yes. So well. Because then it would be necessary to understand the scope, magnitude, the depth of need. That would be ours.
Because theirs. Is another. It is less. It is foreign. Or exceeds our ability to be understanding, fair and rational. And you eat, of a bite, our most bulky volumes of human laws.
And it leaves us empty of real reasons to deny what cannot be denied to someone who lives.
And we weaken so much that it makes us invalid unable to step up the path of appreciation and loyalty.
We are poor. We are not rich. We are poor of everything that is not measured with money. And we cling to the stones of our walls to defend the redoubt of our moral poverty.
And we must do so. Because they are many. There are too numerous invaders that come to us, fleeing from the unreasonable. They are almost an entire nation. And we can't. Allow it.
Only. If perhaps. We can negotiate down. Involve others. Perform exchanges at the table of economic pacts. Remove a new compensation and stimuli policy for our new collaborators from the sleeve. Desperately, the barrier of an ally capable of containing the dark avalanche that threatens to leave us without light.
We, who were educated with sweet words of harmony and friendship. And we became older by sending alleluyas to the moon and the sun of our great social moment. Now, taken to the point of having to choose, we choose to forget what they learned. And return to the darkest alleys in our history.
No time. No temple. Sewn to the old clothes of our worst costumes.
It just can't be. I don't want it to be.
But it is.
Is.
And now I don't have much more to say.
Return to my Damascus clock. And give him rope one more day. Because I don't want to stop marking the time I live. I don't want to forget this moment.
It is too serious. It hurts too much. And it breaks, within me, a large part of everything I once believed and that it cost us so much to build.
By Pepe Navarro
