Fwd: St. James Matamoros-Maura-Convivencia

[Maura Santangelo]

Had trouble sending this first time around.

> Xose',
>
> it must have not been much of a Convivencia if it inspired the kind of
> ethnic cleansing which occurred with the Reconquista.  Some people
> must have felt threatened and excluded.  I do think that the ideal is
> convivencia, but it has to be inclusive.  All the different groups
> have to agree to accept not just tolerate difference. Look at the
> recent examples on ethnic cleansing in India during Partition and
> Yugoslavia in more recent times.  In both cases there had been living
> side by side for many centuries.  You could say that it happens
> because people who want power will exploit these feelings of
> exclusion, but you can get into an infinite regression about who
> started what first...
>
> On a personal level I have one set of reactions when I live on this
> side of the Atlantic  (this is the 'we have to accept that Europeans
> are different'), a different one when I live on the other ("we have
> been waiting for this moment for 500 years").  What I feel on the
> other is the 'racial' fear I referred to before.  But I am aware that
> my fear is the real problem.  It comes not in response to what is
> going on at the moment but it comes encrusted with retold history of
> previous events about which I have no direct experience.   It is in
> fact a kind of insanity.  It is created and kept alive by holding on
> to a sense of how things were, what 'my culture' is supposed to be and
> should remain.  it comes from holding on to something which does not
> really exist.  Luckily I don't seem to feel it in meeting a real
> person, it comes only in the abstract sense of perceived threat and
> the more conscious I am of it, the more it seems to lose its hold. In
> fact just thinking about it to answer you has helped.  Some things do
> not survive well in the light of day.  As a Buddhist teacher I know
> says "that's why they call it practice"
>
> Peace
>
> Maura
>