Appearance and opinion...

Today’s a little bit colder than others are and an unusual wind reminds me November and its festivities: All Saints Day and Dead Day, it also reminds me about the traditional dish called fiambre and, of course, the infernal advertisement campaign about Christmas, “20 days to get to the most beautiful month in the year”, bla bla bla.

A nice cup of rice with chocolate seems to be the right choice to accompany me at the beginning of my daily routine. Reading the newspaper takes me only fifteen minutes nowadays because it seems to be that we have the same and repeated stories everyday. Murders, beheadings, accidents fill the news, bad news running through the country which force us to distrust everybody around us and to pray harder looking for celestial help in order to come back home safe and sound, without a scratch (or even with scratches but alive).

¡Oh, those days! I wish I could go back to the time when it was possible to practice the good manners instilled in us by our parents. The courteous greeting or a nice smile that was traded when one met the neighbors, acquaintances or even the strangers. Those memories came stronger to my mind when I read a comment written by a young man in the Sunday’s news, where he talks how the police treated him just for his appearance. I wondered that day if the liberty of speech exists in this country. Why our society wants us to become clones of the current fashion trend? What’s wrong about the desire of wearing whatever we want?

I understand, of course, that the gang problem has made many and diverse expressions to look suspicious and people end to believe everybody with a different appearance belong to a gang.

However, if we pay attention, during the past few years, criminals have started looking like respectable people, very neat and now it’s rare to find a thief who looks like the preconceived idea we have of them. My father had a “close encounter” with some female delinquents in a bus. Those women wore according to the newest fashion and seemed young women going to their work. However, my father heard how, without any shame, they analyzed the bus passengers and their belongings; and when they noticed that no one was wearing anything valuable said loudly: “let’s get out of this piece of shit because only poor people is riding this bus”.

We’ve read about many stories of discrimination against the indigenous people when they try to enter to nightclubs, restaurants or hotels and they have been rejected because they have been wearing their native clothes.

Wonder if we judge accordingly to our own condition.