Malmö

A quick little glimpse of Malmö from last summer that I cut together yesterday. The town, across the sound from Copenhagen as you make your way to Stockholm, was a one-day-one-night stop for me, and it's in the news this week as right-wing nationalists in the States have decided to seize on its refugee population to scaremonger it into a reputation of being a Terrifying Hellscape. It's, uh, not.



I obviously know very little about Malmö, given the duration of my stay and the obvious fact that it takes time and work to understand any city of any size. But like most places in Europe, it felt (and, er, is, by most available metrics) exponentially safer than just about any place in America if only because it's much harder to get firearms there, though of course not impossible.

In the interest of not turning this blog into the Angriest Place Ever, I'm mostly trying to avoid getting into the weeds of the vile, mendacious behavior of the GOP and right-wing media in the age of Trump. But since this week's propagandistic fraudulence touched on what I tend to write about here, thought it worth the detour to say: nope. Remember how eager these people are to lie to you to grab at power, and notice the people who instead, like whoever posted the signs at the end of the video, are willing to stand up for the dispossessed, the displaced, the discarded, who have nothing to offer but their frail humanity. Any party that held actual Christian ideals would be rushing the barricades to defend these people, regardless of their faith, even if they did pose a danger (as they do not).

Tomorrow, I'll probably have a bit of a lighter post up, reflecting on a generally-pretty-lovely, informative, future-clarifying week, but for now: enjoy scenic Malmö, and keep fighting for all the good that's worth defending in this complicated and thorny world!