Almost my whole life I’ve thought that it’s important to be curious. And I still am curious and I still think it’s important. But being curious doesn’t mean I understand things. I fact it seems to me that the older i get the less I understand. Last week seventy three men, women and children were found dead in a truck abandoned beside a busy highway in Austria. It certainly was an outrageous atrocity…but one that has been repeated and building for at least several years as people flee in the thousands from lands wracked by war, poverty, starvation and disasters. Shiploads of wretched humans push off in the dark and many of this human cargo ends up in the Mediterranean sea…dead. Do they know they could die there? I think that they do…but that it’s better to die trying to reach a place where survival and maybe more is possible. Two hundred years ago people were forced into leaky ships sold into slavery in the new world…there were also thousands who crammed themselves onto leaky ships to try for a new life in the new world.
The leaders of Europe are exasperated…what to do? They blame “human traffickers” for the “problem”…but the problem is so much greater and more complex. Blame rests with a world that reacted to terrorism with massive devastation of whole countries…a world that stood still while the destabilization of countries spawned civil wars…even more hideous terrorism…and the decimation of whole populations. Our civilized nations wrung their hands in the United Nations while starvation and genocide raged in Africa…while dictators used barrel bombs and poison gas on their own cities. The U.N. spends billions to set up refugee camps in deserts so bleak that not even a weed can grow…And the camps can hold only a fraction of people driven from their homes, their lives, their minds. And so they take every penny they have…they buy passage on a battered rubber raft and hope to make it to Italy…they get loaded onto trucks and driven into Austria…and hopefully to Germany…or England…or France…or anywhere…else. I can see the back lash building…I read comments on news web-sites where people write things like…”we should sink a few of those boats and maybe they’ll get the message” or “we should just pack them up and send them back” Or the most obvious…”Don’t let them land”. I know too that it’s all contributing to the growth of a vicious ultra right wing nationalism all over Europe that will inevitably lead to more outrages. I’m losing my curiosity about this…because I can’t imagine an answer or even the beginning of an answer…and the frustration makes me both angry and incredibly sad. I don’t understand but I’m pretty sure that this is our problem…all of us…everywhere. And here’s what else I know…if we were watching our children, wives, brothers sisters starve…hide in cellars from bombs and bullets…we would be trying to do the same damn thing those refugees are doing. Escape!
Chagal4's Blog 
August 30, 2015 at 11:46 pm |
Blues for Prime Minister!