Core Course Week, Sejerø, and Guns in Denmark
Hello everybody,
I promise I haven't fallen off the face of the earth! I had a busy core course week, spent this past weekend on an island called Sejerø, and to be honest... I've also been thinking a lot about what happened in Florida on Wednesday.
Sorry to begin this post in such a depressing way, but especially in light of these events and within the realm of cultural comparisons, I feel it is relevant to discuss gun control on this blog.
I'll catch you up on the past two weeks first.
Core Course Week is a block of time on the DIS calendar for students' main study track groups to conduct field studies, visit Copenhageners with relevant expertise, and travel with their peers and instructors to relevant cities and/or countries. My core course is called Cultural Diversity & Integration, and we spent two days studying in Copenhagen before going to the Swedish cities of Malmö and Göteborg for the rest of the week. One of our main tasks during the week was to hit the streets and ask random Danes and Swedes about their thoughts on a topic related to cultural diversity and integration. I'm currently writing a summary paper so I'll discuss that component of the trip in my next blog post!
Notable meetings throughout Core Course Week included:
- A representative for the City of Copenhagen's Employment and Integration Committee, which has the stated goals of helping newcomers find stable jobs; preventing social dumping (i.e., the exploitation of foreign and/or newly-arrived workers through low wages, poor treatment, etc); reducing the school drop-out rate among immigrants (particularly those pursuing vocational training); and creating a more substantial culture of inclusion, active anti-discrimination work, and democracy.
- An immigration lawyer and an Iranian asylum-seeker-turned-paid-translator from Trampolinhuset (Trampoline House, named so as a symbol of mobility and a positive outlook for asylum seekers and refugees). It is not, in fact, a house full of trampolines :) It's a facility that provides translation services, legal counsel, and community space for asylum-seekers hoping to stay in Denmark.
- A representative from the Danish Refugee Council's Mindspring project, which utilizes group therapy to work through refugees' trauma, share cultural information, and form networks among the participants and local professionals.
- Activists from the Hassela Movement, a rehabilitation program for individuals recovering from addiction and/or trauma in Sweden. Participants are armed with coping skills and leadership training so they can better their own lives and hopefully find jobs that prevent children from experiencing the same difficult circumstances.
- Members of Sverigedemokraterna (the Swedish Democrats), an extreme far-right political party that reluctantly admits to having evolved from a Nazi ideology, but openly declares multiculturalism to be a scourge on Swedish culture. Needless to say, I had a lot of.... questions [read: fights to pick] for them.
- Mentors from Fryshuset (Freezer House; I'm still not sure why that's the name of the organization), which offers all kinds of multicultural programming for youth in Sweden. These groups range from boys' and girls' activism networks, human rights education courses, interfaith alliances, and play groups for children from single-parent families.
We also stopped by the famous Danish art museum, Louisiana (pronounced "luciana"), on the way back to Copenhagen; along with seeing a Calder mobile and one of Yayoi Kusama's mesmerizing rooms of mirrors, I learned about several amazing Danish artists, both modern and historical.
So as you can gather from that list, it was a pretty busy week! I still managed to interview several people for the class project, explore some art galleries in Malmö, try various Swedish candies, and get to know some of my classmates a bit better. Also, on Friday, our class attended a performance by the Swedish musician looptok. If you like indie, folk, alternative, and/or electronic music, you should check them out on Sound Cloud!
You can see pictures from Core Course Week on the gallery page.
As for this past weekend: on Friday, I joined Isabel, Torben, and Rose at Torben's summer house on the Danish island of Sejerø. I had to take two trains, a bus, and a ferry to meet them because they left on Thursday and I got out of class on Friday afternoon (the past week was their winter break); it wasn't too bad, though, because it was beautiful to watch the Danish countryside go by and I got some practice navigating on my own. I also ended up running into Torben's mom, Merete, and two of her friends, Jacob and Merete (yes, there were two Meretes!) on the ferry, so that was nice.
Torben's boys like to poke fun at the house because it has no internet, but I found it rather wonderful! It was a time to explore outdoors and to curl up with a book as the sun set. I didn't have too much homework so I felt like I could really place myself in the moment and enjoy eating, hiking, and talking with my host family. We collected bright yellow snail shells; spotted hares, horses, sheep, and roosters as we drove to the grocery store, made delicious tuna salad, and hiked up to the old lighthouse at the northern end of the island. It was a good weekend and I was thankful I had the chance to tag along!
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Now, for the much more serious part:
Danes are horrified by American gun culture, and so am I.
When I read about Wednesday's mass shooting, Rose was in the shower, Silke was out with friends, and I was supposed to be working on homework. I couldn't focus on anything but the shooting, though. I talked with Isabel for quite some time as the information flooded our newsfeeds (she has family and friends in Florida)....
Some readers of this blog may remember that the school across town had the potential to become a national statistic in 2012, when a freshman brought a gun and an axe to his health class, holding his peers hostage until his teacher tackled him to the ground. Because of the catastrophic potential of this incident, the possibility of a mass shooting was my worst nightmare during high school; when we did active shooter drills, the images we are currently witnessing from Marjory Stoneman Douglas were the sorts of images that crossed my mind. What if my school was next? My classmates? My teachers? Me? My sister? My friends?
These fears could have entered my mind at an earlier age, but when we huddled in the corners of darkened and locked classrooms for drills in elementary school, the teachers told us it was to practice for a dangerous animal, such as an angry dog, entering the building. And as six-year-olds, we believed them.
Six-year-olds.
My masculinities professor, who is in her mid thirties, has never heard of, nor has she ever participated in, a "code red drill." Rose, Silke, and Sara - my host sisters - have no idea what it's like to have their school buildings staffed by full-time, armed police officers.
The fact that they've never had to think about these things is incomprehensible to me, because every American school I know of has a lockdown procedure and at least some sort of security personnel.
Guns are very difficult to access in Denmark. Even hunting licenses are hard to come by. You have to provide a compelling reason for wanting a gun - and by "gun" I mean a hunting rifle. You have to provide a compelling reason for wanting a hunting rifle, and AR-15s are inaccessible to civilians (as they should be). Shootings are few and far between; the last major shooting incident in Copenhagen occurred at a synagogue on Krystalgade in 2015 and killed two people. The body count was so low because, according to one of my professors, the shooter was armed with only a pistol. I have no doubt that more lives would have been lost if he had had access to a higher-capacity weapon.
Denmark is able to mourn its dead, because the shootings are so rare. In America we get whiplash from trying to keep up with all of ours.
This does not have to be our modus operandi. It is possible to live in a society where fear does not grip us day in and day out.
I could go on, and on, and on, but I think I'll stop here: Kinder Surprise Eggs (yes, the little chocolate eggs with toys in them) are banned in the United States because they pose a choking hazard... but our government can't agree that AR-15s shouldn't fall into the hands of, well, anyone?????
