Guess the riddle

A self is a self.

It is not a screen.

A person should respect

What he has been.

This is my past

Which I shall not discard.

This is the ideal.

This is hard.

The Ideal. James Fenton

Guess the riddle Which country are we talking about?

150 years ago in that country, people had to emigrate to another country called the United States in order to survive. That was not so long ago. The people of that country were, yes, migrants and they were trying to escape from famine and harsh living conditions. There was nothing there. The same is certainly true for the migrants living in that country of migrants today. None of them doubted for a second that leaving was the right thing to do. If they wanted to have a future, it was the right thing to do.

Many of those migrants were able to move forward with their families because they were treated with respect and dignity in the places where they had arrived. Although it was not easy for them, they were not persecuted, harassed, mistreated, humiliated, or destroyed. They worked hard but were allowed to live in peace. They strove with the illusion of seeing their dreams come true. They wanted nothing more - like the emigrants living today in the land of the riddle - than to contribute with their work and their talent to make a better country. A real one. That was all.

And today, 150 years after all that has been conveniently forgotten and locked away in the drawers of armored archives, some of the descendants of those emigrants, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, are conspiring to put an end to any foreign presence -whatever it is, wherever it comes from, whatever it does- in the land of the riddle to preserve the essence of its pristine and immaculate past without immigrants. A past that, as we have just explained, never existed. And among other things, it never existed because they are descendants of immigrants. Moreover, they exist because of their immigrant past. They are as much migrants as the migrants who (still) try to make an honest living in the country of the riddle, and from which they are disappearing more and more.

The interesting thing about this whole conundrum is how it ends. Because the main consequence of the way the former migrants treat the current migrants is that we are rapidly returning to the situation we were in 150 years ago. A place where there are no opportunities to live. A place that has entered into economic recession, where it is increasingly difficult to find a decent job, and where social differences are growing and growing. For the first time in 20 years, more people are leaving the country than are entering it. And all emigrants are leaving (the descendants of those of the past and those of the present), all of them.

But this time the reception story for these old migrants may not be as positive as the last one. Especially because in November someone who is like them may come to power. You know, someone who wants to make the country great again with his golden letters, spitting poison, deporting and decorating its walls with machine guns. What will happen then? Will they return sad and crestfallen to their land of riddles to plant potatoes while retrieving the old photos from the bottom of the file drawers? Or will they simply take a languid and timely selfie which they will then conveniently tweak with a dash of AI to post on X encouraging them to continue their holy crusade?

Guess, guess, which country are we talking about? Here's a hint. It starts with "S" and it's not Syria or Sudan.