• Only Water in a Stranger’s Tears

    ‘It’s only water in a stranger’s tears.’  I start with this line partly because I’ll always get in a musical reference if I can (it’s a lyric from the song Not One of Us, by Peter Gabriel), but also because it sums up to me what defining ‘the other’ (the foreigner) seems to be all about: denying the humanity of a particular group of people.  And perhaps nothing defines our humanity as much as our tears, whether from grief, distress, fear, or even happiness.  We shed tears when emotion, that quintessentially human experience, overwhelms us.  We cry with sympathy, too, and not just for people we know.  You’d be forgiven…