I'm so worried for where we are headed. I worry about what we're about to witness, what we're already seeing. We are facing collapse. Many in developing countries are already in the thick of it. Many of those people are coming to where we are (developed nations) to seek refuge. Developed countries everywhere are truly surrounded by a collapsing world, now. We all knew this day was coming.
People knew it would happen decades ago and chose to do NOTHING about it. They kept on driving their Escalates and their Suburbans, living in homes 3 times bigger than was necessary, keeping their lights on, turning their AC down to 68 instead of 72, flying yearly - monthly - weekly for business and for pleasure, buying the biggest TVs, tucking their children safely in their warm beds, and falling asleep watching Johnny Carson - while the coal burned and the planet got hotter. They knew they were doing. They what was coming and didn't care. So here we are.
I get that it's scary. I understand nationalism increases in times of uncertainty, because it's scary. But it's not the refugees that scare me. It's not even the changing climate that scares me so much. It's people's reactions to these things that's the most terrifying to me.
Forgive me, but I was raised by a different generation. My mother couldn't care for me, so I was adopted by my grandparents - and they were OLD - even for grandparents. I was born in 79', my grandmother in 28' and my grandfather in 1906. I was raised by people who were generations removed from me and they taught me a lot. They lived through the depression, my grandfather remembered the Titanic sinking and WW1. My grandmother worked in a parachute factory during WW2 as a teenager as her 3 older brothers went off to fight the Reich in Europe. One of them never came home.
They saw what nationalism does. They saw what scapegoating does. They saw and taught me what it leads to. Germany was going through terrible economic hardship before the rise of the Reich. What we're facing is more than economic hardship, we're facing total catastrophe; a climate that is beginning to batter humanity and will ultimately take our economies, our comfort, our food, our water, and likely, many of our lives with it. That is truly scary. However, the path of least resistance - enclosing ourselves in a bubble in the developed world to keep out anyone not "like us" - is NOT going to stop it.
My grandparents instilled such a sense of caution against the attitudes I'm seeing and hearing it's, quite literally, visceral for me. I see hundreds of exhausted, hungry, sweaty, unbathed men forced together into cages and it chills me to my bones. I see whole families, with children, smashed into concrete rooms so tightly that faces are pressed against the glass windows, in the United States, the country my grandmother's brother died to protect from such atrocities, and I am haunted. I hear my grandmother sobbing in my ear, her voice echoing from a past that she warned me to always be vigilant against its ever being repeated. I hear people saying things like "Build a wall and put men with guns on it" or "Shoot before they can cross" - not once in a while, but constantly, everywhere, and I am physically sickened by it. And then I realize, this is just the beginning. The refugees will keep coming and their numbers will keep growing - and I am overcome with fear and apprehension, not of the refugees, but of what we will do to them when it becomes too much.
How are these inhumane attitudes and reactions going to help us? Do we think we're immune from the changing climate, the food scarcities, the water depletion? We're not. It's coming for us too whether we act with compassion or with barbarism - it's still coming for us. Given the opportunity, I would take a Guatemalan family who walked 1000+ miles to save their family from starvation as my neighbor, a thousand times over when that day comes, over some old white guy who's spent the last 30 years in a recliner, lamenting about "the foreigners" and "illegals" and begging for a wall.
If this attitude isn't stopped, if it continues to spread, we will bear witness to unimaginable atrocities as this unfolds - like it or not, that's reality. Those atrocities won't protect us, but they will ensure that when our turn comes - AND IT WILL - not only will we have the suffering of collapse to contend with, but the suffering of our hearts, minds, and souls as well.
Please forgive me, I couldn't keep standing by and not saying anything. I can't stand by as this unconscionable ideology continues to spread like a cancer, anymore, and stay silent. It's not normal, it's not political, it is hate - it is evil - it is dangerous - it leads to the worst kinds of acts against humanity itself. I just can't. Peace!
"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana
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