Re: Refuge

My uncle is aghast that in his country, refugees who travel across the English Channel are “put up in hotels”. I’ve long since given up on his rants about the injustices of the immigration system. The reality of finding a place of refuge for millions throughout the world is a reminder of global inequity. Privileged folks, like my relative in the UK, just don’t see past their own need to protect their borders with walls or fences.

Poets like Robert Frost would disagree. From Mending Walls: “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out/ And to whom I was like to give offense.” Perhaps artists are the first to lend sympathy to those forced from their home environments by war, persecution, climate change, or lack of employment opportunities. No one who wasn’t suffering hardship of any sort would make a choice to go to a foreign land. When I read of refugee camps, I consider my mustard seed of related experience and feel great empathy for these wandering nomads.

“Are there no workhouses…” is a line spoken by the miserly fictional character Ebenezer Scrooge, as he brushes off a plea for Christmas charity. Those humans who seek refuge from the pains of the world are of no concern to this wealthy man. The billionaires continue to profit from playing with their money while the 99% struggle on with the results of bottom-line focussed corporations and ostrich politicians. Mother Nature has no voice yet the signs of her woe are everywhere.

We had a storm in our spot by the sea yesterday. Trees swayed in the gusts and heavy autumn rain fell. I revelled today as I looked up to see flocks of birds appear out of some mysterious hidden location further up our street. I walked gingerly, stepping over branches and mounds of leaves, and wondered where they had found a place of refuge. Reading the newspaper later I discovered ferries had been cancelled, power lines downed, and op/eds were shrieking over the lack of attention being paid to climate change.

Where is refuge to be found from the onslaught of depressing news. From my perspective as a media consumer, I often feel myself to be a refugee trying to stay balanced in this modern era of deliberately manufactured discord. I feel history will look back on the 2020s as an equivalent to the horrors of the two previous world wars. The idea of a current definition of WWIII would include; cyber insecurity, polarization of states, economic irregularity, resource misuse, widespread inequity, global human migration, climate instability, religious intolerance, military expansion, and pandemic unpreparedness. The list reads like the side-effects, in fine print, found on the package for the latest cure-all medication.

Some sort of prescription is certainly needed if humanity is to make it out of this century alive. Veterans of past wars sought shelter where they could and helped their neighbour when they could. Time for us to do the same.