Saturday 25 June 2016

The Forgotton

Just a thought:

While we were distracted by the UK leaving the EU, it made me think about what the whole campaign actually did and I for one fell for it. I was pretty damn selfish and seldom did I spare a thought for the refugee "crisis" and the victims of the horrors of war in Syria. Where are those millions of refugees right now and how are they suffering?? They have no food, clothes, healthcare, nothing. People are dying in their absolute despair to save their loved ones, while the global media has made us become desensitized and indifferent towards human suffering. Yet, all we need to do is to spare a single thought by trying to imagine ourselves in the position of one of those poor souls in Syria or fleeing to find a kind home in Europe. What would it be like if one of us suddenly lost a parent, a child, brother or sister in such horrific circumstances and we were so lonely in our inconsolable pain in a world that has come to take my suffering for granted as a new normal?

I wondered why there wasn't outrage on the streets of London, New York or Paris when news of the extermination of 6 million men, women and children in Nazi death camps filtered through and even more under Stalin. Did the generation after 1945 just get on with rebuilding their own lives and pretend they didn't know just because they relied on a subservient media to inform us? Why haven't we learned anything and will be held to account for our apathy in years to come when we hear of the diabolic extent of human suffering in Syria and across Europe.

The very least we can do is to prevent right wingers from exploiting leaving the EU and perhaps the best we can do is to see it as an opportunity of realising that people power gave us self determination to no longer look beyond continental barriers, but national barriers, followed by community, then family barriers and eventually our own individual barriers. When we reach such a stage, perhaps we can realise that `I, me, you' can make a difference by our overwhelming capacity for `selfless' love and compassion and to comfort the inconsolable stranger in a see of migrants and refugees......

Somewhere a mother who has just lost her husband is forced to helplessly watch her last child die slowly of hunger because she cannot feed it and I am forced to weep because it was due to my own selfishness.