To wear or not to wear ... Burkini

I bet you've seen the pictures. The pictures of three policeofficers standing around a woman wearing a scarf on her head and are fully dressed from top to toe, who only a few moments before was enjoying the sun while relaxing by the beach. The pictures have immortalised moments of the law against burkini in France being enforced. To me the pictures radiate the humiliation of a woman who does not want to lie on the beach in a tini-tiny bikini having to take of layers off of her clothes just because some politicians think denying others wearing a burkini will help in the fight against radicalisation or what ever is the reason for this law. 

I find it hard to believe that a law against burkini as well as a burka and so forth is going to eliminate the problems that seems to surface in the world today. Actually, the pictures of this specific woman taking of her clothes makes me even more convinced that the laws are marginalising specific minorities within the society - a marginalisation that can have fatal consequences as it may foster a generation of individuals who will act out on the society because they don't feel understood or met as the individual they are. 

Evil always comes from somewhere and I find it hard to believe, when society attempts to enforce its ideas within the individuals private life that it would not cause a negative reaction of some sort. Because, what will be left if society took away your ability and right to think for yourself: act as you find right, and wear whatever you want? I mean of course there is a limit to how an individual should act - I am here referring to when one individual harms another. But there is also a limit to how much a government will be able to control one's private life and what is going on behind closed doors. And maybe, the implementation and the enforcement of such a law will cause even more radicalised ways of thinking that could foster the very idea of terror and violence as the only means of expression. 

The troth is, that the pictures to me does not necessarily show a Muslim woman, but a woman hanging out on the beach, relaxing. The truth is that it could have been me. I am very conscious with my body - especially when I can't cover my flaws with clothes. The idea of wearing clothes on the beach from top to toe is not that foreign to me. 

So, in the end I see myself in that woman. As a person that affiliate to a certain belief-system. As a woman and as an individual who's right to have a private life could be disrupted by a government who finds me radical and different and who acts against me with fear of what I could become and not with curiosity of what I am. And if that government strip me of everything I am and believe in, pushing me to the edge - who knows, how such an individual, with nothing to loose will act against an enforcement of fear. 

Instead of acting out of fear of what who seems foreign and different could become - lets meet it with curiosity and with accommodation so that society does not foster individuals with nothing left to loose, but individuals that can help develop a society that can help others.