AGRUSTIC
SOMNACUNI || ROMANY || CRADLE || LET US PRAISE
THE ROM || CHUPPA || MEDIATHECA 'FIORETTA
MAZZEI' || 'ENGLISH'
CEMETERY || AUREO
ANELLO ||
APARTHEID/INCLUSION
The Gospel of Jesus is the Gospel of Inclusion, of women, of
Samaritans, of lepers, of thieves, of all those whom male Jews,
themselves oppressed and exploited by the Roman Empire, hated and
feared. Christ's dream is for right-brain peace, Julian of
Norwich's and Bob Marley's 'One Love'.
In America Thoreau and in Russia Tolstoy
wrote on Civil Disobedience and Non Violence against war, against
injustice.
My father, Glorney Bolton, was a journalist for the Times of India in the 1930s.
India had been conquered first by the East India Trade Company,
then by England, and laws were enacted to the benefit of the
powerful, against the Indian people who had lost their
sovereignty. Mahatma Gandhi, who revered Tolstoy, used
non-violence, enacting to the oppressor a theatre, a mirror, of
the oppressor's injustice. Salt was monopolized as in the Roman
Empire so also in the copycat British Empire. Gandhi chose to walk
to the sea at Dandi, to boil sea water and to illegally produce
salt as an act of freedom - for which the police attacked and beat
the participants who turned the other cheek and went peacefully to
prison. My father was present at that act of freedom - speaking of
witnessing Gandhi's simple act of walking to Dandi and boiling sea
water as history quietly being made.
In America cheap labour was provided by slaves brought from
Africa, slaves who were forbidden to know how to read or write,
who could be bought and sold at will, their families separated,
husbands from wives, children from parents. Even after slavery
ended African Americans could be lynched, murdered, their bodies
mutilated, by the Ku Klux Klan. I remember benches and drinking
fountains in parks in the American South with labels saying
'Whites Only'.
One day a part Black, part Cherokee, part Irish lady, Rosa Parks,
sat, not in the back row of seats in a Montgomery, Alabama, bus
but too near the front where only Whites would sit. She refused to
comply with the unjust rules and laws. Rev. Martin Luther
King organized, in Gandhi's manner, a boycott of all the
Montgomery buses. The city ground to a halt. Eventually, after
many Freedom marches with Black and White participants, some of
whom were lynched, King was able to speak in Washington D.C. in
front of the Lincoln Memorial, his splendid speech, 'I have a
dream'.
The Roma in Romania were slaves of the nobles and monasteries from
the Middle Ages until the nineteenth-century when Uncle Tom's Cabin was
translated into Romanian, longer than were Africans in America.
Roma have still not achieved Civil Rights. When I first went to
America I heard Whites say of Blacks that they could not be
trusted, that they are criminals, of sub-normal intelligence.
Today, I still hear such comments said of Roma by Italians and by
Romanians, that Roma steal, that they steal babies, that they are
dirty, that they don't work. My experience of Roma is that the
police steal from them their money they need to send to their
children looked after by the grandparents in Romania, who are
starving, that the police steal their blankets from them in the
coldest nights of the year after forcing them to sleep in the open
from having bulldozed their shacks with all their belongings,
including medicines and documents, that we steal their babies for
being adopted into rich Italian families, that Roma are
scrupulously clean though allowed no access to water, and that
they work extremely well, preserving ancestral skills as
blacksmiths, stonemasons, carpenters, gardeners, etc. It is true a
Roma camp is surrounded by rubbish, but inside their living space
everything is clean, shoes taken off, carpets washed, this because
anything spiritually or physically polluting is thrown away from
the living space. There is no official rubbish removal given to
them. This, I learned from the town government in question,
because when I telephoned I was told: 'They do not work, they do
not pay taxes, we won't remove their rubbish'. Consequently rats
gnaw babies' feet in Florence. But our laws in Italy do not allow
Roma to work. Nor can they find work in Romania. For which they
must have the diploma and a house. How to break this cycle?
The Gospel of Jesus is the Gospel of Inclusion, of women, of
Samaritans, of lepers, of thieves, of all those whom male Jews,
themselves oppressed and exploited by the Roman Empire, hated and
feared. Christ's dream is for right-brain peace, Julian of
Norwich's and Bob Marley's 'One Love'.
AGRUSTIC
SOMNACUNI || ROMANY || CRADLE || LET US PRAISE
THE ROM || CHUPPA || MEDIATHECA 'FIORETTA
MAZZEI' || 'ENGLISH'
CEMETERY || AUREO
ANELLO ||