Imagine a family. Father, mother, three children. They have their way. Breakfast, Sundays, the upbringing, the tone of conversation at the table. It's not something they think about. It just became like that.
And just that - just getting there - is hard enough as it is.
To find each other as man and woman. To agree on how to live. To build a family that can hold, an everyday life that can carry, a tone that doesn't break when life gets hard. It's not a small thing. It's the biggest thing most people ever attempt. And most struggle with it - every day, all their lives, in one way or another.
A good home is not a given. It's an achievement. A long, quiet achievement that requires patience, forgiveness, adjustment and will. Even two people who love each other and want the same thing have plenty to deal with to make it work. Even two who share language, faith, upbringing and worldview must work for it.
So when you've built it - when the family functions, when the children thrive, when there's calm enough to live - then it's something. It's not something you just layer on top of something else. It's not something you just share. It's not something that can withstand being mixed with a completely different way of living, without something breaking.
Now imagine that it happens anyway.
Another family moves in.
Into the same house.
Still the same space and number of rooms.
Not visiting. They stay. And they have their own way, which is not the same.
They don't eat the same things, and they don't eat at the same times. They pray before the meal, and everyone must respect that. The TV is not welcome in the living room. Music from the first family offends them. They have a different view of what girls may say, what girls may wear, what girls may decide. A different view of what boys owe the family. A different view of authority. A different view of who has the last word. A different view of what can even be discussed.
The first family makes room. Turns down the music. Eats later. Refrains from talking about certain things at the table, because it offends those who are no longer guests. Dresses slightly differently in their own home. Begins to think before they say something. Withdraws to the bedrooms. Whispers.
The second family does not make room. Not because they're evil, but because they didn't come to make room. They came to live as they believe life should be lived. It's not negotiable.
And so they live there. Two families under the same roof, not facing the same direction. The world spins in both directions at once.
The first thing that breaks is not the furniture. It's what can't be seen. The tone between the spouses. The freedom at the table. The unconscious calm a home builds over years, where you can say anything, because you're home. Suddenly you're not home. Suddenly you speak quietly in your own kitchen. Suddenly you look over your shoulder before you say what you think. Suddenly you choose your words, not to be loving, but not to stir something.
The children sense it first. They don't know what to call it, but they sense it. They stop bringing friends home. They stop singing. They begin to ask before they take something from the fridge, which stands in their own home.
In the end the house still stands.
But.
The home is gone.
This is what we have tried to do with an entire country. And not just one.
For Europe's part, it has happened to virtually all countries.
Simultaneously.
Because it happened simultaneously everywhere - without anyone being asked, without anyone explaining the abyssal incompatibilities. Or just the challenges that would follow. On the contrary, for nearly four decades people have tried to explain them away, with a language where words have changed meaning along the way - and as if it was the family living in the house that was the primary problem.
We call it diversity. But diversity is only a strength when there's agreement on direction, on what applies, on which rules we build upon. Within the common, differences become richness. Without the common, differences become noise.
And a Human does not live - and thrive - in noise.
A human needs an order it understands, a predictability it can relax in, a ground beneath its feet that doesn't shift every time someone rings the bell.
This applies regardless of what the human believes. Regardless of where it was born. Regardless of which culture it carries with it. The human flourishes when it lives in a reality that roughly rhymes with its interior - its nature, its faith, its way of seeing the world, its understanding of what is right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, holy and ordinary.
It's a precondition.
A human who must negotiate about the most fundamental things every day - what may one say, how does one dress, how does one raise one's children, what is a woman, what is a man, what is a family, what is home - uses all its energy navigating before it even gets started living. It becomes tired in a way it cannot explain. It becomes distant from itself. It loses its own tone.
And this applies to everyone.
It applies to the Dane who no longer recognises his own city. It applies to the Muslim who lives in a society whose fundamental premises contradict his faith. It applies to the Jew who senses something coming back he thought was over. It applies to the ordinary person who just wants things to make sense.
None of them thrive in the current construction. Not because they are evil to each other, but because humans are not built to live in a reality where the world spins in several directions at once.
That's what we've forgotten.
That society is not just economy and legislation. That society is the quiet layer beneath it all - the shared understanding, the shared language, the shared picture of how life should be lived. When that layer disappears, the calm disappears. And when the calm disappears, the Human disappears bit by bit with it.
We say enrichment, and experience displacement. We say cohesion, and build parallel lives. We say Denmark, and no longer mean the same thing our parents meant.
No family can withstand having two families in its home.
Neither can a people.
❤️🔥🪽