Neither home nor abroad

On the evening of the (most recent) Russian invasion of Ukraine, I unwittingly enjoyed a sour Russian beer, which I had bought earlier in the day from a Catalan craft beer shop in the heart of Barcelona. Although I couldn’t read most of the label, I deduced it was made with pomegranate and guava, as per the picture on the can. Neither fruit is native to Russia.

In the days since, I have read a lot of reactions regarding the invasion on social media. Some balanced, others not so much, a particularly unbalanced one has stood out to me. In a LinkedIn post, a user declared he was removing all first-degree Russian connections from his account, as if the actions of an autocratic ruler are somehow directly related to ordinary citizens- and the best way forward is to cut off communication with them. As if it couldn’t have happened to any of us had we been born and raised there and not where we were. As if humans are fundamentally different depending on where we are from. I promptly removed him as a connection (just kidding).

As I mentioned in my post “Madrid”, my present reality is one “in which foreign lands have all but ceased to exist, (and) that awesome exhilaration of the past (while traveling) has been replaced by something more subtle and difficult to describe.” In an attempt to describe it anyway, it stems from having escaped “the prison of youth.”[1] While my “divide” began to come into sight sometime in my early 30s, I am still in the process of crossing it, as it appears to be vaster than once imagined. My point is that the “foreign”, like the “other”, is relative and depends on one’s perspective. When I was younger and most of the world was still unfamiliar, most of it seemed foreign to me, but now that I am older and I can see the familiar in the unfamiliar and more similarities than differences among us, I have lost the concept of foreign. Of other. A connection is a connection, independent of nationality. A nation is a shared social construct. People are not. People are real.

This is not to negate culture, which is also independent of nation. Culture, like genotype, shapes people. But culture is meant to be communicated. With everyone around, which today, means everyone in the world. Like it or not, we no longer roam the planet in small bands of a few dozen, but we roam society as individuals in nations that are affected by every other nation on Earth. In our highly globalized landscape, the actions of one inevitably affect the others, as has been demonstrated by the global pandemic and the start of yet another war with far-reaching consequences. The answer is not to remove. It is to reach. To communicate compassion, love, and kindness. And while some people are not capable of this, most people are.

Neither the pomegranate nor the guava are native to Russia. And I am not native to Barcelona. But the fruits added an incredible flavor to a beverage that is enjoyed around the world, and I enjoyed it that evening, neither home nor abroad. Imagine a world in which there is so little communication and cooperation that nothing can be enjoyed. Then imagine that there is no world at all.

[1] See “Sonnet.”