The following grew out of an exchange with @otfrom@functional.cafe and @jack@berlin.social. I think it's important to have quips at the tip of our tongue ready for right-leaning arguments. They don't care about congruency but they do care for confidence and showmanship. So be it!
The key is to have answers ready for all the shit people pick up and repeat without thinking it through because it sounds good.
Somebody tells me that demographics will lead to the collapse of our pension system? I tell them I sure hope we let in enough foreigners to pay for my pension.
Somebody tells me foreigners are taking our jobs? I tell them there seem to be a lot of jobs in the care sector.
Somebody tells me foreigners don't like to send their children to school? I tell them the Chinese kids and the Indian kids seem to be doing OK.
Somebody tells me that the kids from the Balkans are different? I tell them that the Balkans used to belong to Austria and I agree, the Austrians are different.
Somebody tells me I'm an anti-Austrian racist? I tell them that I wanted to be Austrian and that I had Austrian citizenship but they kicked me out when I got Swiss citizenship. It's the Austrians who are xenophobes and remember how they elected Waldheim, twice?
According to one post-war investigator, prisoners were routinely shot within only a few hundred metres (yards) of Waldheim's office … Waldheim later stated that "he did not know about the murder of civilians there". -- Wikipedia
Somebody tells me the foreigners take up all the land, reducing biodiversity? I tell them it was the Swiss who voted against the biodiversity initiative.
Somebody tells me we build more and more buildings because of all the foreigners coming in, reducing the arable land? I tell them that the Swiss voted against an initiative trying to protect arable land, too.
Somebody tells me that nevertheless the foreigners need space to live and Switzerland is out of space? I tell them that only recently Zürich allowed ordinary buildings to have four stories instead of three and a building boom ensued. It was the Swiss that didn't want dense populations.
Somebody tells me that Switzerland is overpopulated? I tell them I lived in Bangkok where the city alone had twice as many people as all of Switzerland and it was OK.
You see how this is going!
In this, I am of course also not overburdened by consistency and rigour. It's more important to be confident and entertaining, I fear. And if by chance a conversation about salaries, work permits, border crossings or whatever develops, that's even better!
I guess my hope of persuasion is a very tenuous one: when I was a teenager I'd hear something like "trickle down economy", think about it for a bit and then reach the conclusion that it was probably true, it made sense to me. Having reached this conclusion on my own made it seem like it was "my" idea and that made it a pretty insidious idea. It took me a few years to unlearn that one. 😅 So my hope is that the quick response will keep on resonating exactly because it requires some of the listener's processing to close the gap, so to speak.
I just have to be careful with those quips. I don't want to make an argument for the environment that one could turn around a few times and get a fascist arguments, for example. Ugh!
#Switzerland #Xenophobia