It’s like the plot to a bad horror-movie sequel: After escaping the terror of the first home that brought great loss and anxiety upon the family, they move to a new place. Lo and behold, they cannot escape the ghoul or the aliens or the circumstance of having murderous neighbors and have to deal with the same fear-inducing thing as the first place.
Except it’s even worse than having ghosts turn off your lights and possess your child for a while. It’s the very real, very heartbreaking life that thousands of refugees from the Middle East have lived. They flee daily bombs and human rights violations, a lack of basic necessities and constant worry. They have to leave behind everything they’ve ever known to go to a place where they don’t speak the language and don’t know the culture, and even the voyage itself can end in tragedy. Children go missing in these stages by the thousands.
And when they get to their new place, are they really farther away from the missiles and the war zones, free from the refugee camps and the constant travel?
Well, hostility is still wildly rampant.
The fear exists in both parties -- the newly arrived and the non-refugee citizens, as the number of crimes grows alongside the population. Herein lies the tragedy: Culture clash means that neither side, on the whole, understands the other, and though efforts are being made to bring the two populations together, it’s not nearly enough.
Countries can’t throw their borders back up fast enough to stem the tide of increasing asylum seekers. According to The Independent, Germany’s onslaught of good feeling towards the crowd has faded, and now they “turn away hundreds of migrants” every day.
Though Cologne’s New Year’s Eve contained an unforeseeably high crime rate, the negative response is, I believe, the wrong one. Anti-refugee protests are on the rise. Pig heads were thrown next to a refugee site, a clear insult and a clearer sign: Refugees Not Wanted. Vigilante groups prowl Finnish streets and Czech trains, believing in their ability to keep their fellow citizens safe. It’s hard to separate the strings and see if this backlash is religion-based, race-based, or merely a response to the economic and social pressure from a swiftly growing population. It could also be a combination of all three -- or more.
The main issue is not with refugees, or ISIS, or the government leaders. It’s with the passionate, extremist sides of the political spectrum that feed into the textbook definition of "terrorism" and incite rash actions from people that build prejudice in the minds of society and encourage it to fester. A cycle is not fed by one side alone, and when there are countless groups feeding off the negativity that is created, an endless, dark spiral occurs and sucks the world in.
I’m not trying to trivialize people’s feelings -- on the contrary! I understand that we all believe we’re in the right, and all societies put most emphasis on the safety of the family above the self. I understand that the past hundred years or so has brought a lot of social turmoil, hardships, and pain. I want you to understand that acting out of fear, however, never got us anywhere in the long run. Global empathy in a globalized, connected world is what we need, not immediate reactions that only make things worse.
If we don’t seek for harmony in neighborly spirit, we can only have strife. If we don’t actively work together to solve the world’s problems and give basic rights to the human race, in one hundred more years there will be more struggle, more heartbreak, more blame, and war. Causing more problems will, logically, lead to more problems -- not solutions. It’s a lesson all children learn -- immediate gratification doesn’t necessarily lead to the better end.
The Pope this Lent advocated for an end to indifference, not just to give it up for Lent, but give it up indefinitely. Going to protests may make you feel heard, make you feel like a part of a community of like-minded people "looking out for the country." But for every group of people thinking they are doing right in all the wrong ways, fear is created and the spiral keeps going. I don’t know how to appeal to radicals who have made up their mind about the "us vs them" dichotomy, but I’m hoping someone somewhere will think about the consequences of action and the other side.
Violence, as the adage goes, is never the answer. Make love not war. A peaceful handshake requires two hands, reaching out to each other. Mitigate the crisis of hate by education on all sides of the worlds others come from, by seeking to empathize instead of jumping to conclusions, and above all: Don’t do all the work for those that seek to seed fear in order to create weakness.
Otherwise, the ghost of mistakes past will move on from the house, to the neighborhood, to the city, to the world. And really, truly nobody will be safe.
