I am at a loss for words on how to
delicately describe my own feelings on all this. I feel like there is nothing I can write that won't fall squarely into the taboo realm of political incorrectness.
Without delving into the truly difficult and treacherous waters of this conversation, let me stay in the shallow end of the pool and simply say that this situation involves conflicts that can arise from two different elements of any community: 1) people who are merely culturally different from "the norm", and 2) people who are just plain anti-social and possibly imbalanced to the point of criminality.
Let me start with the first element:
There was
a recent thread here in P&CE (less than 6 months ago) about a foriegn film called "Woman in the Street" about young women who live in
(I think) Paris (or maybe Amsterdam??) Antwerp, Belgium, and who are constantly harassed by
foreign men who hang at street corners and/or sit in the outdoor chairs at various cafes. As these women walk by going about their business, they are always --without fail--called out to by those men, some actively chasing the women for a block or more and verbally soliciting sex from them, and some merely standing back/sitting back and cat-calling sexual innuendo at them during their stroll past the men. The difficult thing here is that what the men are doing is not illegal. And when the men are asked "Why are you doing this?" They have no real answer other than that it amuses them to do so. When the men are told directly that they are frightening the women, the men scoff and deny such a claim as a lie, asserting they have done nothing wrong and caused zero harm to anyone.
The situation in that film is one of two different cultures. The men in the streets are primarilly Middle-Eastern or African, and in their culture they would NEVER cat-call or chase after a woman if she were being escorterd by a man (because in their culture, the man would be her protector). But, in their culture's view of pedestrian protocols, any woman walking alone is most likely a prostitute which means she WANTS to be spoken to that way. But even if she's NOT a prostitute, there is in their culture a social disapproval of a "non-prostitute" woman walking alone in that she is seen as bringing shame on her family for walking unescorted ad therefore
looking like she might be a prostittute via her alone-ness. And therefore she DESERVES to be cat-called to. And so the males in her family (her father or brother or husband, or even a male cousin or uncle) had better get on the stick and either start walking with her everywhere, or else keep her at home "where she belongs."
This is a situation where the social conventions and norms of a foreign culture are --via unchecked immigration-- finding a happy and uncontested home in a new culture, and allowed to flourish and perpetuate at the expense of the pre-existing culture. (Here's where I am standing in politically incorrect territory.) This is when I say "bullshit." Those women should NOT be subjected to that shit. But they are. And no one is able to stop it.
As for the second element in my over-simplified lecture ....Those are the freaks, the cat-ladies, the stereo-blasters, the once-a-month bathers, the loud-sex screamers, the back-yard hog-roasters, the incessant drinkers -- and so many other behaviors which are annoying as shit but likewise NOT illegal. Trying to combat the second group is problematic when trying NOT to unintentionally lump them together with the first group.
The first group has a legitimate culture with a (basically) functioning society. (Many would say those various Middle-Eastern and African societies are actually
dysfunctional, but I ain't goin' there!) So attcking their behavior is philosophically the same as attacking their culture. The second group is anti-social, a-functioning, and not legitimate at all. But separating outGroup One from Group Two is an undertaking fraught with landmines too complex for me to imagine we can just start writing laws willy nilly and get it all sewn up nice and neat and take care of with no problems to either the principles of plurality or the sacredness of human rights.
