The election program of GroenLinks has no paragraph on diversity.
There is not a set of lines, of sentences or ideas placed in one place. You can not find a title “diversity” and read all what we are going to do to support the increasing and marvelous diversity of our city.
And that is a good thing.
There are developments that looking at them today seem self evident. Think in feminism. How could it be that for so long so many people was excluded from decision making? impossible, right? Well, it was possible and we all were the less because of that. Excluding half of the world population from making decisions produced a poorer version of what we could have been. As we have learned in the last decades, increased participation of women in the labor market, or in politics, or anywhere! improves the quality of whatever you are looking at.
So one would wonder how comes that in 2021 we needed a whole Black Lifes Matter to get the issue of ethnic diversity to the front of politics and societal debate. Or, from the other way around, one could also imagine that a revolution on ethnic diversity is so much overdue, that yet another racist episode of the north american ongoing tragedy was enough to radicalize and bring to the streets millions and millions of persons all over the world.
So then... why now do we decide to skip the paragraph on diversity, precisely right now when it is more needed, when more people is looking for it? Do we believe that our electors and our fellow citizens have “woken” up so much that we need not to make policy about diversity anymore?
Of course not.
Read on and you will find in every theme that our program touches, ideas and concrete policy that support diversity. Because diversity is not a thema apart. We need a diverse economy, as much as we need open spaces that are welcoming to all the sorts that inhabit our cities, as much as we need education institutions, security institutions and financial institutions! that understand and act on the needs of the whole palette of society, from light to dark skinned, from low income, from low education, to the earners of highest salaries and the highly educated.
A friend used to tell me that he could not vote for green parties because we campaign on trees and animals and environment, and that is so important that everybody should know, so greens are simply populists campaigning for a extremely obvious issue that everybody agrees upon. I realized then that we were failing to bring our message to my friend. Because we are not a green party. We do not campaign for animal, or for plants or for nature. These campaigns and standpoints we left to the one issue parties, like the animalists parties existing in several countries.
We campaign for relations.
We understand that humans can not live without nature, without a proper flourishing nature. And we understand as well that nature can not flourish at the cost of poverty, of human suffering. Both the animals and the persons, the plants and the cities need each other. This is what my GroenLinks has always stand for.
And for diversity. For diversity that is more than a fashionable line on tolerance and acceptation. Because diversity, both in natural ecosystems and in human societies is crucial to type survival and the flourishing of the whole. So no paragraph on diversity, appart. Diversity is all over.
That is my party, and that is the election program that I am working for.