the line.

I'm very interested in the limits of what is and what isn't acceptable.

Am I a bad person for my opinions? If I can argue my case, does it make it acceptable?

I had some friends over and was getting to know a girl who shares my hometown. We were both asked about our opinion on Latvian-Russians, and both of our answers fell in the lines of 'We're not bad people but we loathe them'. Another friend butted in and said, 'That's what they all say'. 

And so surely that makes us horrible people. How stereotypical of us to loathe 'foreigners'. Isn't that how Brexit happened, anyway? It's all brought on by that feeling of 'strangers in our homes'.

So where would you draw the line?

 - Someone rolls their eyes as cars and people flood their small village. 'Tourists,' they say. 'Hate them.' 

 - An older lady gives a student an evil look. She mutters incoherently under her breath. 

 - 'I hate them,' she says. 'They're everywhere and it doesn't feel like home anymore.' 

 - Another headline flashes. 'Standoff in Italian port as Salvini refuses to let refugees disembark.' 

It's hard to figure out the right things to say. How come the world's become such an uncompassionate place?

Of course these are all very different situations but they still bring in the same kinds of human characteristics.

But if I gave you my case for the third one, perhaps you'd find it easier to forgive the statement?

If I told you that more than half of the people living in my hometown are Russians with Latvian citizenship who refuse to speak Latvian, or that it's almost impossible for young people to find work unless they speak fluent Russian, or that the current leading party in our Parliament is mainly Russian -

- and knowing that we only gained our freedom in the 90s, and that thousands of Latvians were wrongly imprisoned and slaughtered, and that the rest of the world still finds it amusing to compare us to Russia or only acknowledge us as 'one of those Soviet Union countries'?

Would that make that statement acceptable?

Then again most countries have had difficult pasts so how come we're allowed to complain?

The more I think about this, the more confused I am. I feel that perhaps we are bad people after all.