Posted yesterday at 5:00 p.m.
By signing the preface to My life on the road by Gloria Steinem, Christiane Taubira reminded us: there is an “urgent need to work together. And it’s not a chore, if we know how to restore the sensitivity that emanates from these causes against sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia… This sensuality depends on the flesh. It is for beings of flesh, not for abstractions, that these battles are fought”.
Wherever we must kneel to say “Black Lives Matter” again, the fight for respect remains to be won. Wherever we have to stick posters on the walls to say “women’s lives matter”, the fight for respect remains to be won. Wherever we must demonstrate to proclaim “the lives of homosexuals and transsexuals matter”, the fight for respect remains to be won. Wherever we have to defend the fourth age so that it is not considered an underage, the fight for respect remains to be won. Wherever we must denounce the persistence of discrimination, the fight for respect remains to be won.
As long as we have to bury women and men who died of extreme poverty and indifference, the fight for respect will remain to be won.
As long as economic precariousness drags women and men into a spiral of shame and social exclusion, the fight for respect will remain to be won. As long as the “inevitability of transmission” that Annie Ernaux tells in L’event persists, the fight for respect will remain to be won.
So let’s fight.
Let’s fight by focusing on reweaving the social ties that allow us to build ourselves. This requires us to fill the gaps in our society that damage relationships of affection and to go beyond the current limits of the forms of our individual and collective solidarity.
We seem to have little awareness of the difficulties of an individual whose all ties are falling apart. We need to learn how to create, or nurture, relationships with those who allow themselves to be overwhelmed by the shame of having lost a job, a spouse, or of not getting by at the end of the month. We must learn to stand alongside those who are victims of rejection, within their homes or from their friends and work colleagues, those whom some refuse to accept and recognize in all their difference. We must make solidarity one of our guiding principles as individuals and as a society. Without obligation or imperative, if we endeavor to make mutual aid take precedence as soon as we can over indifference, we will help to restore self-confidence to many.
We have made fraternity the third pillar of our republican motto. In 2018, the Constitutional Council recognized the constitutional value of this principle and derived from it “the freedom to help others, for humanitarian purposes, regardless of the legality of their stay on national territory”. We are free to help each other. Let us take full advantage of this freedom. The very foundations of our society stem from the principle of fraternity. It is at the heart of the preamble to the 1946 Constitution, thanks to which we collectively guarantee the protection of health, material security, rest, leisure, the right to adequate means of existence, equal access to education, vocational training and culture.
Let us dare fraternity and the rights and duties that flow from it. Let us strive to bring it to life, to make sharing take precedence over selfishness, to give substance to solidarity.
In other words, let us now always make concern for others prevail over indifference, and respect in the relationships we build with them.
The principle of fraternity is also, on a global and intergenerational scale, the foundation of environmental protection. Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada Charles Gonthier, among the first, theorized the fact that “not polluting the space of other countries, respecting the biosphere as a common good of men and leaving a viable environment for future generations is a duty of fraternity” (I use the words of Guy Canivet). However, in France, while the climate emergency requires radical changes in practices, one summer sees a big leap back on the ban on glyphosate, another the announcement of the return of neonicotinoids which leave no chance for pollinating insects . Or how to be at the rendezvous of the destruction of biodiversity and the battering against the environment and the planet. Let’s finally stop walking on our heads. Let’s fight to regain respect. Let us fight so that the promised equality of rights finally translates into real equality, so that everyone is recognized in the facts and no longer only in the texts as a subject of law equal to all other subjects of law.
Between women and men, equal pay has become one of the most fundamental issues, as the gaps are enormous and the pace of their reduction slow. When the World Economic Forum announced, in December 2018, that at the current rate parity in the world of work will be reached in two hundred and two years, it must be admitted that a sigh of weariness precedes the irresistible desire to get up sleeves. Irresistible desire, because we have the means to go faster, further, stronger, thanks to the energy of youth, thanks to activism, thanks to education, also through new legislative obligations, and by making know, too, a very simple reality: more equality between women and men means more wealth for everyone.
Respect!
Agathe Cage
Equator Editions, 2021
172 pages
Who is Agathe Cage?
Doctor in political science, Agathe Cagé was adviser then deputy director of the cabinet of the ministers of French national Education from 2014 to 2017, before becoming secretary general of the campaign of Benoît Hamon, candidate for the French presidential election in 2017. She has notably published Breaking down the walls between intellectuals and politicians (Fayard, 2018).