“Another boat with Refugees found capsized, 55 dead, many of them small children”. (News Headlines)
As I walked on one of the treadmills at my local gym today, focusing on my own body – how it felt, how I was breathing, making sure I was connected to myself – I had quite a realisation.
I have observed that there is a lot of fuss about refugees at the moment – in the media, on political agendas, basically everywhere you look. No big realisation perhaps, but this realisation came when I pondered upon the reception they are given; how we actually meet them?
There is this huge ‘problem’ (as some people are putting it) called refugees. We call them a problem before we even meet them. They flee from war, famine and many other forms of abuse. Many are already broken, sick, injured, or all of these. Many have been abused before, during and even after their plight: some raped and beaten, some have seen loved ones murdered, or drowned, and they have risked their lives (some many times over) to escape their tortured existence. They arrive most often in the West and are invariably subjected to hate, discrimination and further ‘mental’ torture when they are already in a state of total desperation.
It’s as though they are not humans, they are something else – a burden on us, a nuisance, a plague of unwanted debris – and not our responsibility. And we are told by politicians and other authorities that they come here and cause problems, they have no money so we have to support them, they are lazy, they are criminals, all tarred with the same brush; we are even told that many of them are supposedly ‘undercover terrorists’ that will try to kill us in the years to come.
And this is not a question of politics, e.g. of political parties saying “Yes” to 5000 more refugees when they know there is an election on the horizon, or saying “No” to the same question to catch the other end of the vote.
On considering this further I wondered – have we forgotten that we are all the same? And that despite our circumstance, no one person is better than another.
And I also wondered why we feel this way about refugees … particularly as not too many generations ago many of our families were refugees in one form or another.
We do not own this planet, though many think they do. We are all one global community so anything that happens on this planet is for us all to consider. We are all custodians of this planet – and this crisis of refugees is on our watch.
What if rather than the question “What should we do with them?” or “How can we send them back?” we might consider –
“What is truly going on here that in our so called modern age (with all the technology and infrastructure that we have) we have ‘refugees’?”
Surely with all the technological advances etc., human atrocities like refugees should be long since extinct?
How then can we work together as a global community to reframe this issue – more so as to offer the true support that is needed? And why is it that this problem is worsening by the day and yet many of us are watching as bystanders? Or seeing the harrowing pictures on the news yet are not feeling to speak up or act in some way?
I’m not raising this here so that we necessarily each drive down to our nearest port and collect and house every refugee (though that is an option), but so that we take a step back and look more deeply at what is going on. And if we do take a step back and ponder, we may just realise there are many ways to help; individually, as groups, organisations and governments, and that even the smallest things can move mountains as our collective creativity knows no bounds when we open up our hearts to these societal atrocities.
If we treated this as a community issue and worked on this together we might consider many options – it could be just by making one meal for one refugee or it could be taking a family into your home and treating them as your own family (as here on earth in truth we are just one big family). Or people of great wealth, companies, institutions, governments, with many homes or properties or resources, could provide “homes” (not just shelter) for several or many families. Every drop, from the tiniest kind word uttered from a place of love to the grandest action, will help the world become a better place for us all to live in, together.
If we stop to realise that together as a worldwide brotherhood we could act to make changes together, to meet these fellow equal human beings with compassion, with love, honesty and respect instead of the way we treat them now, perhaps they would no longer be the ‘problem’ we all fear.
What if the ‘refugees’ became an equal part of our society, as they all truly deserve to be, no longer mirroring the hate and mistrust we project onto them? And in this they could start to feel ‘safe’ again?
There have been refugees in society for many lifetimes. It is obvious here that the issue is not going away, but worsening, and that we haven’t as yet got to the root of the issue nor to the truth of a response.
Isn’t it time for us to consider this more deeply?
By Christopher Murphy, Kindergarten Assistant and Universal Medicine student, Drøbak, Norway
Further Reading:
Corporate Social Responsibility – The State of Our Working World
What’s right with this World?
A True Role Model: Universal Medicine = Universal Responsibility
1,046 Comments
My life is more richer more filled with love and certainly more interesting knowing the refugees i know, they are my family and deeply honoured i am to know them.
By being consistently the same love with everyone even if we do cross paths I don’t treat them as any different and act as a role model for others to be the same. I have met a few refugees or people coming to London as their country had financially crumbled but that doesn’t mean I have a right to treat them differently.
‘have we forgotten that we are all the same?’ And if it is not directly on our door step affecting us does it matter? Well yes it does but we seem to currently to live our lives or are more concerned with something when it directly affects us .. then we start worrying. Also what I am becoming aware of more and more is how the media choose what we should be concerned about or not, how they can focus on just one thing (and it might not even be true what they are focusing on) and miss out so much more that is going on. Like is asking ourselves why when we are supposed to be living in a more ‘intelligent’ time do we have more refugees than ever and even though slavery was supposedly abolished have more human trafficking than ever before.
Indeed, we are all the same, and all equal human beings, ‘I wondered – have we forgotten that we are all the same? And that despite our circumstance, no one person is better than another.’
When we use the word refugee we may see it as a label and not that these are people, people who are seeking a hand in welcome and friendship to live equally with all.
Yes the refugee ‘crisis’ really shows how much we have made it about countries and ownership of the land even though you rightly say we “We do not own this planet, though many think they do”. This ownership creates a separation of who belongs and who does not belong and all understanding goes out of the door. It shows too how comfortable we have become that we rather turn our head and look the other way hoping someone else will deal with it.
I find it interesting how there is never any doubt that every person on the planet is a human being, which you would think would instigate an immediate sense of equality between us. And yet, there continues to be so much separation.
Great article Christopher and the key words and there were many was – ‘meet these fellow equal human beings with compassion, with love, honesty and respect ‘ – We sure do need to be open in this way and we also need to bring this into every relationship we have. Our key principles of treating another as an equal and how you would like to be treated has simply faded away, and we could even ponder on whether it was there in the first place.
I work mostly with young refugees and what I’m learning is that many are scared and this is when their own prejudices, anger and demands show. The budgets to support them when they turn 18 are greatly reduced and this can be a great source of disappointment, though housed with the same rights as UK 18 year olds involved with children’s services and in receipt of the usual benefits, it’s still not the safe haven they fought for their lives to travel to. That they are treated with great respect and decency is so important because that provides a steadiness that they need to get them through a great adjustment period.
I can’t understand why one human being would stop another human being moving to a place that’s safer and more beneficial for their well-being. Surely being safe, having a home to live in, food and water and a life that is not in danger is a basic, basic human right – forget countries, or land ownership – why would we ever not want any human being to not have that?
Since planet earth is not our true home we are all refugees, and our purpose for being here is to learn to live in love and harmony with each other so that we can all return to our true home. Sadly many of us are falling very short of our purpose.
Ha ha, great point that we are all refugees here, that we are here to return to live with love, truth, harmony, and in brotherhood with all.
“On considering this further I wondered – have we forgotten that we are all the same? And that despite our circumstance, no one person is better than another. ”
You only need to listen to the news to understand we must have indeed forgotten that we are all the same.
We are the same, and we don’t own this planet, ‘We do not own this planet, though many think they do’.
In these situations, we more than forget that we are one global family and that we are all immigrants. No one is purely from one place. DNA shows us this, and yet we build man-made borders. And we separate each other when in fact this is the total opposite of what is true.
This dehumanising is shocking and something we should not be proud of. “It’s as though they are not humans, they are something else – a burden on us, a nuisance, a plague of unwanted debris – and not our responsibility.” We are but one step away from this ourselves because of the instability in the world, because of our unwillingness to see each other and ourselves as all the same and borderless.
I was pondering the other day on the food situation after seeing on the news how in some countries people are actually starving, when in the western countries gluttony and over abundance abounds, where we have more food than we can eat with so much thrown out, how can this be, the same as the refugee situation, how can our fellow brothers be treated this way.? It all comes down to us and how in our lives we treat those around us, do we treat each other as equal human beings or do we have a them and us mentality.
I love this piece, it is such an important topic to discuss and you are right when we look at the ‘refugee problem’ in that way we have already cast a judgement without actually connecting to people and what is going on for them and responding to this.
It shows a deep arrogance when we refuse to see others as equal. I seriously find it super cheeky the way some people talk about refuges, for it was not too long ago that many of our families were also refugees in one form or another.
We are one world one people -let us remember this and start to have compassion and understanding for our brothers from overseas.
In this world of diversity, it appears that we tend to judge others by their ethnicity, their gender, their age and in this case their ‘status’ as refugees, but in our haste to judge “have we forgotten that we are all the same?” Peel back our skin and all else that we use to identify ourselves and we look like the person we have judged. All these ways of labelling another only add more separation to a world that is already divided by imaginary lines on the earth. We are one family; one humanity, so let’s begin to live as one and see what happens; after all, living in separation to one another definitely isn’t working.
I am often surprised when I hear people talk of ‘not letting them in ” and ‘not letting them have access to our health care’ and so on and so on – genuinely surprised as every part of me knows that the best and true thing to do is to open our hearts. All refugees need Love and compassion not judgement or condemnation.
I love this conversation and how it asks us to consider our connectedness rather than our differences. At no point does a child set out to be displaced, to live a life where they will be considered less than human. So what is it about the way we are living that takes our focus away from decency and respect and instead focuses on technological advancements to name but one of the many distractions?
It is so true Christopher… History tells us again and again what happens when we hold people as less. We are one and anything that says that this is not so must be exposed, revealed, brought to the light of day, and let go of.
The power of us working together as a global community is yet to be realised. Yet it is this precise unity that will supersede the disparity between us that falsely believes that we are separate to one another, as such the problem of one nation are for them to deal with. Truth is that disharmony in one apart of the world is disharmony for us all. For we cannot escape the fact the we are connected, all living in a pool of energy, and the quality of energy in which we live impacts all. Hence the power of us working together as a one community to address the disharmony together in order to restore the harmony we all equally and rightfully deserve to live.
The plight of refugees the world over shows how far away we are from moving as the one planetary family of human beings that we in truth are. And solutions do not go deep enough, they are but mere bandaids. We need to look deeper and examine how we treat each other, those we call our ‘nearest and dearest’ and where it all starts.