Status Updates From The Ungrateful Refugee

La casa y el ladrillo, Mario Benedetti

But that denies them what
they most urgently need: to be useful. To belong to a place.
This, I believe, is the way to help the displaced. It is what we owe
each other, to love, to bring in outsiders.

But in forcing assimilation, are we asking for
performance? We want to see that newcomers are happy, grateful,
that they’re trying. But real gratitude doesn’t present itself loudly, in
lofty gestures. And learning to posture is a much quicker process
than transforming.

Oh girl. I want to hug you. I also used to feel like that, though to a lesser degree. And I hope you could heal from it.

How else was a person supposed to live, I wondered? How do you
find any happiness without goals? Without a place to go? Maybe it
was just me – home was already far away; I couldn’t be stuck in this
nothing land.

How do you make your true story the
‘right’ kind of true? If your listener already has far greater lies
embedded into their worldview, then the only way to sneak the truth
into their mind is covertly, like sneaking medicine into a child’s food.
Perhaps this is why Christ spoke in parables.

I’ll believe in anything, you’ll believe in any thing.

How can one decide what’s the truth and what’s not? What are the lenses through which we view stories? How does a system accurately do that?