A Message to the People of the World, Especially You

The first time I spoke to someone from another country I didn't understand it.

I was too young to fully comprehend that this person was different from me. I didn't understand their accent, their skin color, and their speech. Their customs, their religion. I didn't understand it because I wasn't used to seeing someone so different from me. As a kid, I'd always been with the same kind of people, with the same social status and similar ideologies, same clothing, same circle of friends. Coming from a military background, this isn't unusual.

When I was in first grade in elementary school, I didn't lnow what it meant to be different, just that I was different and it was bad to be unlike anyone else in my class, in my grade. When I was in third grade, I began to realize that I was growing, and I was shaping up to be someone. To actually be someone.

When I was in sixth grade, I moved to another country because of my dad's military involvement. We moved (my mother, father, sister and I) to a country where it was very cold, not like Spain, where it's very hot. It was green, not like in my city, where it was all grey. It rained, it snowed, and in this NATO base I had to go to an international school where I did not understand the language, the people, and their system.

I learned that people came in different shapes, sizes, colours and sounds and touches. Their hair varied in both texture, thickness, colour, shapes, lengths. Skin was just an ammount of pigment. Languages were so many, so varied, it made me scared to think I had to learn English to understand anything they would say. On my first year, the last of Elementary School, I went with people of my country who would understand me. 

That was the year I realized that a common language did not mean they could understand me.

Learning English is a blur to me. I just remember getting better every day. I remember meeting Greek, Slovanians, Hungarians, British, Americans, Canadians, Scottish, Irish, French, Germans, Italians, Turkish, Japanese and so many more. The more they came, the harder it was to define the line that separated a Spaniard and an Italian or a Greek. I became to realize one thing, on the third year of living in that little NATO base in Belgium.

And it was that I loved it.

I loved the languages filtering through one common. I loved my Turkish friend, who blanched at the though of eating something I had eaten and enjoyed so many times as is ham (throroughly Spanish of me). I loved Language Arts, where we read a book and I wondered about the culture of the United States, so different from mine yet much of the same. I loved my Hungarian friend, who would pronounce my name different than the other friends I had. I loved, deeply loved, walking around the hallways and thinking 'We are from all over the world, and yet we are here, as friends and peers and classmates and teachers and students and partners and husbands and wives and couples. We are here and we are different yet we are the same.'

And I look back at it, and want to believe that it could happen to everyone one day. That someone might think of someone from another country as a fellow friend, as someone from the very same place we are.

I always hear things such as 'Well, in America we don't have heathcare' or 'In Spain we have the shittiest educational system' or 'In Greece we have the worst crisis'. I have fallen into that category of thought so many times. But then there's an experience I get through that makes it all the more humbling.

Looking back at humanity, at what we have done, I feel humble. We may have had two World Wars, have committed throrough crimes, knowing they were against human right, against the basic humanity that we all possess. People are mean. They talk, they spat, they fight and discriminate and fight for the sake of feeling powerful.

But I believe that the we are humans, and human nature, to me, is inherently creative. Not good. Not bad. Just creative.

We create. We take things and we pull them apart to see how they work, how we can make them work and develop them and construct them. We have different beliefs, different tastes, different appearances and we all comes from ever corner of the world but how can you believe that we are inherently bad when there are so many things we have been able to overcome?

Abolition of slavery. The millions of constitutions. Universal sufferage. Women's rights. Children labour avoided. Homosexual Marriage. Acceptance of black people. Xenophobia gone the more time we spend communicating around the globe. Wars avoided. 

For a moment, just a moment, forget your homework. Forget your job, forget where you come from, your gender, your sexuality, the colour of your eyes, hair and skin. Look upon yourself and look upon everyone else. Compare your dreams, your desires, your fears and your wishes to someone from another country. From the other side of the world. 

Think of the things you could do. The things you could do just by talking, by being nice, by patting someone on the back.

I want to change the world. And I promise I will.

I will change the world so that they see not countries, not colors, not races, not sexualities, not ideas. Just us. As humans.

We conquered the moon. We beat the plague. We cured thousands of people. We can see the stars. We can travel space. We can make machines work with a single press of a thumb. We created music, paintings, dances, movies, plays.

We made it all. Us. Not them, but us.

We are all part of the same.

You and I, we are part of one single thing called Earth.

And for that, I will always believe that you can do anything you propose yourself to do if you do not give up.

Do something for the world. Do something for yourself. Do something so that years from now, someone will look back and say.

"We did it."