This article was published on Huffington Post on 04.10.2017. You can read the original post here

A few days ago, I was in the luggage drop-off line waiting for my friend who was printing our boarding passes. The airline officer asked me where my pass was and when I told her my friend was just at the kiosk, she nodded and let me proceed ahead. This answer wasn’t good enough for the couple waiting behind me, so they decided to overtake me and get in the front. When the officer scolded them for doing so, the guy replied aggressively “She doesn’t even have her boarding pass yet. I am not gonna wait behind her!”

I calmly responded: “If you are in such a hurry to violate other people’s rights, by all means, go ahead, sir. I don’t mind losing 2 minutes of my time for you.”

A shade of embarrassment passed through his face for a moment. He was prepared for conflict but not this type of response. He murmured, repeating himself “you don’t even have a boarding pass yet.” I shrugged indifferently and pointed with my hand the gap between the person and me in front of me, letting him fill there with his giant posture. Boy, how he seemed confused.

This was an example of the madness happening everywhere in the world, on a microscopic scale.

For the past years, we have seen the right-wing rising in many countries, including my own. We have seen that Yoda was right, that fear was indeed leading anger. Anger was leading to hate and eventually, hate was leading to the dark side.

The fear of refugees made Brits give the call for Brexit, the fear of minorities and immigrants made Trump the president and Recep Tayyip Erdogan directly built his power on polarizing the different segments of society, and before him, Turkey was ruled upon “the fear of becoming like Iran.”

The news is full of hate crimes all over the world. People don’t want anyone different than their way of life around their neighborhoods. Just yesterday I was watching how 500 Syrian refugees had to leave their only belongings in their tents and ran away because an angry mob showed up with axes, stones and stuck in their hands right after one of the refugees had a conflict with a resident. This has happened in my hometown Izmir, The secular fortress of Turkey. Watching people, wrecking tents, breaking the belongings of the refugees made me feel nauseous. They seemed like a lynch-mob right out of medieval ages, and the sad thing was, they were. The refugees weren’t welcomed there, and a small incident has become an excuse of dozens of men to release what they have been holding back for so long; hate…

 

The acts of decency keep going viral in social media because it is the last thing we are expecting from ourselves and others.

I have been traveling for a while now, and I come to learn that all of us is just the same regardless of the country we grew up in. We all laugh and cry the same. We all strive the same basic things in life, such as being happy and healthy. A genuine smile means the same in all languages, and it is the key to lift the barriers among us.

Sadly, many people who just spent their whole lives inside their small circles aren’t aware of this simple fact. That is why the acts of decency keep going viral in the social media because it is the last thing we are expecting from ourselves and others.