Sandals
It is possible to track down my affinity to sandals to the way my father used to dress. In my childhood, living in the tropical Venezuela, sandals were the best shoe that you could use. But Venezuela, not yet globalized, was not the best place to find such things, so for years I heard my father mourn the leather sandals made in Buenos Aires, in that almost universal style called Franciscan, being simply inspired in the saint.
Years came and went, and the fashion made one of those circular turns. Already in my adolescence sandals made in brazil were popular in the market. They weren’t leather, but more modern materials, with black plastic soles and cordura straps. And since then, moving in between Venezuela, Switzerland and the Netherlands, I keep on using, and buying, these ubiquitous sandals, carrying some sort of familiar nostalgia.
Thinking in the globalized world of our days, I have spent the past weeks looking at photos of the dismantling of the Gaza settlers. It is certainly a repellent spectacle, to see the amount of media effort placed to cover the moving of the relatively few and certainly rich families that have been a daily spit in the face of the masses of Palestinians, living close by in abject camps, meanwhile settlers have grew their luxurious houses, their racist occupation and their fanatic agenda. Nobody behind this monitor supports the bloody strategy from Hamas and company, but I am neither able to see with sympathy the suffering of people that has brought hell to their fellow humans for so long time. So it is with a little relieve that I witness the families being moved away, finally.
And curious at being another global witness of this historical movement, I scrutinize the photos, to see if there is something to give the defeated settlers some finally human trait, something that could allow me to see them as just another group of people used in intricate political power games, one of the many tragedies in the near east. Surely, there is something to think about. There are the sandals that all this adolescents wear. My same sandals, teva-like.
In another reportage on this boys and girls, the apparently most extreme front of the settler movement, I read that their ideology touches, perhaps not surprisingly, the borders of the apartheid. They seem to be focus in an ecological future, in the building of ecological communities able to live in harmony with the environment. A close community, by the way. Communities without any relation with the rest of the people, without arabs, or palestinians. I can imagine them, in their almost Californian retreats, bordering the hippies and the nazis, excluding from their midst all other that could threaten their harmony.
A strange world this one that we have. There the sandals of my father, by the way no more produced by the argentinian artisans of yesterday victims as well of the global markets. I think in these israeli sandals, probably inspired by the ones that Francisco de Asis used to wear. The saint of the poor, the saint of harmony with animals, and the endless kindness with the fellow human. Sandals for the settlers, and their dreams of an israel without arabs.
Today is not so cold in Utrecht. My sandals are in between other shoes that I could possibly use. I wear my other shoes, instead.
Years came and went, and the fashion made one of those circular turns. Already in my adolescence sandals made in brazil were popular in the market. They weren’t leather, but more modern materials, with black plastic soles and cordura straps. And since then, moving in between Venezuela, Switzerland and the Netherlands, I keep on using, and buying, these ubiquitous sandals, carrying some sort of familiar nostalgia.
Thinking in the globalized world of our days, I have spent the past weeks looking at photos of the dismantling of the Gaza settlers. It is certainly a repellent spectacle, to see the amount of media effort placed to cover the moving of the relatively few and certainly rich families that have been a daily spit in the face of the masses of Palestinians, living close by in abject camps, meanwhile settlers have grew their luxurious houses, their racist occupation and their fanatic agenda. Nobody behind this monitor supports the bloody strategy from Hamas and company, but I am neither able to see with sympathy the suffering of people that has brought hell to their fellow humans for so long time. So it is with a little relieve that I witness the families being moved away, finally.
And curious at being another global witness of this historical movement, I scrutinize the photos, to see if there is something to give the defeated settlers some finally human trait, something that could allow me to see them as just another group of people used in intricate political power games, one of the many tragedies in the near east. Surely, there is something to think about. There are the sandals that all this adolescents wear. My same sandals, teva-like.
In another reportage on this boys and girls, the apparently most extreme front of the settler movement, I read that their ideology touches, perhaps not surprisingly, the borders of the apartheid. They seem to be focus in an ecological future, in the building of ecological communities able to live in harmony with the environment. A close community, by the way. Communities without any relation with the rest of the people, without arabs, or palestinians. I can imagine them, in their almost Californian retreats, bordering the hippies and the nazis, excluding from their midst all other that could threaten their harmony.
A strange world this one that we have. There the sandals of my father, by the way no more produced by the argentinian artisans of yesterday victims as well of the global markets. I think in these israeli sandals, probably inspired by the ones that Francisco de Asis used to wear. The saint of the poor, the saint of harmony with animals, and the endless kindness with the fellow human. Sandals for the settlers, and their dreams of an israel without arabs.
Today is not so cold in Utrecht. My sandals are in between other shoes that I could possibly use. I wear my other shoes, instead.
posted by Unknown at 2:01 PM
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