Those who can weep for another

The day before yesterday I was under the influence of a discussion program on Habertürk, hosted by Mehmet Akif Ersoy, on the rising negative perceptions about the Syrians. Not only that program, of course; the words we have been hearing lately on television and on social media were heading toward exhausting even my optimism about humanity. I say "even mine" because it is no secret what an incurable optimist I am, philosophically and politically.

Until yesterday, a phone call I received while driving in traffic... I saw that an unknown number had called earlier too, but I had not noticed.

I answered, and on the phone was an extremely saddened, sorrowful voice. A situation not at all unfamiliar to me. Being in politics, I receive many calls of this kind every day. Many people who are helpless or feel helpless see the politician as a door to a remedy. Mostly people whose own children or relatives are unemployed asking for jobs, those seeking redress for a grievance they have suffered, those requesting transfers under family reunification, or those who call just to share their troubles. It is not possible for any human being to meet so many requests and attend to all of them. But sometimes even just listening to someone's troubles can do some good.

I understand that the voice on the phone is very troubled; for a long time, without introducing herself or getting into what her problem was, she simply describes the kind of helplessness she feels. I assume it is the kind of call I receive every day, and I listen for a while with a measure of routine born of that familiarity. "Won't you introduce yourself," I say, "what is your issue?"

She comes to the point:

They have a neighbor, a Syrian. He has been their neighbor for a few years, but since coming to the neighborhood he has become so close with the neighbors, has touched everyone's life so much, that he has become like a member of the family.

"For example, when I was ill, I received from him attention and help that I did not see even from my own family," she says. "In Syria he and his relatives fought both against Assad's tyranny and against extremist terror organizations. His brother died, and he himself was wounded in the leg and now has a platinum implant. He came to Türkiye, was given a residence permit to live in a certain city and settled there. But since he could not make a living in that city, he came to Istanbul. He has been living in the same place ever since.

When he was in Syria he was a respectable businessman, well-off, engaged in trade. Now he does whitewashing, painting, whatever work he can find in construction, but even if he sits at home hungry he never tells anyone that he is hungry, that he is in need.

The whole neighborhood loves him very much and considers him one of their own. Because of the practices that began a while ago, he has shut himself in his home and does not go out, because if he goes to the province where he is registered, he cannot rebuild there the order he has set up here, and he makes a living here, one way or another; what will he do there? We, the neighbors, collected signatures among ourselves; we do not want to lose our neighbor. We say do not take our neighbor from us."

As the woman tells all this, her voice grows more tearful toward the end. At the end she is sobbing. I will not lie, I could not hold back my tears either, my words stuck in my throat, I swallowed, and for a while I could not respond.

What I experienced was like a miracle. I know. Those uncomprehending, merciless, racist voices we have witnessed lately could not be the voices of a noble nation that for eight years has opened its doors to the oppressed, the wronged, the destitute, and has become their Ansar.

This was the miracle that appeared at the very moment when hope was about to run out. Among the calls I had been accustomed to until now, describing people's own individual troubles and demands, for the first time one made me witness something like this. This voice was not asking for anything for itself, it was asking for someone else. It was not crying for itself, it was crying for another. Though I would never turn a deaf ear even to someone crying for themselves, the ethical level, the human level that one crying for another represents shows us the heights of the most honored of creatures.

Meanwhile, grand politicians and professors speak about a people nearing 4 million in total as if they were a lifeless object, without taking into account any individual life, feeling or emotion.

There is a dark atmosphere in which a discourse at the level of "let's expel them, send them away, let them get lost, let them see to whatever becomes of them" is increasingly becoming normalized, and as it is normalized something of humanity is lost, and moreover most people do not even notice what is being lost.

In Ayşe hanım's voice I suddenly felt the conscience and moral beauty that I had thought suppressed in our noble nation beginning to shine into this dark atmosphere like a sun rising again.

That beautiful voice, again weeping and pleading for another, says: "Please, if you wish I can send you the signatures of those neighbors in the neighborhood too, don't let them take our neighbor from us, we have grown so used to them."

A neighbor, after all!

The Syrians came as muhajirs. That is true. Being a muhajir is not an eternal condition. And as individuals they have not become a burden in anyone's life with the qualities of being muhajirs.

Yet now they are neighbors to us.

What rights did a neighbor have over whom? Did it have to do with citizenship, with the taxes we pay? I do not know about this or that. In Ayşe hanım's voice "weeping for her neighbor" I saw a ray of hope for all humanity.

It says: the other is your neighbor. The other is not hell, nor a stranger, nor an object. The other is your neighbor. Period.