Common Ground

Sitting in my comfortable studio apartment, the rioting going on outside of Paris might as well be going on in another country. I see the photos--like this one here--and it just doesn't reflect anything I've experienced here. But I know people who live (or used to live) in the cities north of Paris. And I know that the RER B running out to Charles De Gaulle has been on suspended service because it passes through some of those areas. The police don't know what to do, the Interior Minister just keeps referring to the rioters as "scum," and Chirac's calls for peace have fallen on deaf ears. And all of it just proves that you can't hold people down for long before they explode.

And on a different note, but related in the grand scheme, I got my hair cut yesterday by a man whom, I learned, arrived in France from Vietnam. Still a child, he came here 26 years ago as a political refugee as a result of the war. I couldn't bare to ask, but I'm certain it was because his parents were killed. A war, a quarter of a century ago, of which neither he nor I had anything to do with, but here we were speaking French to each other in Paris. Not our native language, not our original home. Transplants, but for extremely different reasons.

As I walked away from the salon, thinking about the inter-connectivity of the world, I realized how incredibly disheartening "power" is. Those who have systemically marginalized the immigrant population here in France are not the same ones on the streets trying to calm the riots. Those who made the decisions to go to war in Vietnam weren't the ones who fought. They weren't the ones who lost their families. They didn't get transplanted as children to a foreign land. They are the ones--whether here or elsewhere, whether now or yesterday or tomorrow--who call the shots but avoid the bullets. Yet when you step away from the politics and power, reduce the world to its least common denominators, we are all individuals who have to interact, who find similarities and differences, who can connect and have conversations, who can come from different worlds and still find common ground.