To give space to the nameless, faceless and voiceless!
Horror, sadness, rage, anger and a feeling of helplessness, of powerlessness. Short-term flaring up of affects and stirring emotions here, long-lasting, persistent feelings there, and all this before what we call mood, it colors our experience background, it is, so to speak, the primordial layer, the ground of feeling.
It is the global warming, what is called “climate crisis”, as if it would be a temporally manageable crisis and not a generation-spreading world change, before whose foil all further conflicts must be read, because a world-spreading cooperation, a togetherness is demanded.
Instead, horrible wars are raging, the one that touches us in Central Europe for very different reasons in the area of Ukraine, but also in Kurdistan, in Syria, in Yemen, in many regions of Africa. Conflicts in South America, in Asia – basically there is no region of the world where military conflicts are not being waged, which in turn lead to even more horror, grief, anger and rage.
Not to forget the economic antagonisms. Just as trivial as existential: Rich against poor! More and more super-rich against more and more super-poor. More and more exploiters against exploited.
The prisons are full also because of this. People are imprisoned if they don’t want to belong to the super poor anymore. Or if people go beyond the very narrow corridor that government systems keep open for protests to articulate their fear, but also their anger about the existing conditions, they are also locked up. When people express dissenting opinions, as is currently the case in Russia, for example, they can end up in camps. People who can no longer endure the brutal present without being stunned, who take various substances to escape into a colorful world of illusion, are also imprisoned. Depending on the country, even the death penalty is imposed. And people who flee from starvation or an otherwise hopeless living situation, they are also locked up in jails, if not killed, or inhumane border regimes are set up, resulting in the death of countless people.
Solidarity Weeks like this one in August 2022 are an encouragement for those held in prisons as well as for those who are threatened with imprisonment. Because it is a work against forgetting. As a rule, interest in people wanes when their criminal trial is over. But Soli Weeks bring the names, the faces and the voices of those concerned back into the focus of attention.
This is a Sisyphean task, because the number of prisoners is increasing rather than decreasing, and all this happens against the background of existential conflicts and disputes, which in turn attract all attention.
All the more beautiful that there are people outside the walls who fill this week of solidarity in August with life and keep it alive.
With heartfelt greetings
Thomas Meyer-Falk
currently JVA(SV)
Hermann-Herder-Str.8
D-79104 Freiburg
Source: solidarity.international