Every morning I wake up in a king size bed, get ready for work. Which means taking a shower in one of our bathrooms, going into one of our spare bedrooms, where I lazily keep most of our cloths. After that, I walk down the stairs, past another spare bedroom that we use as an office, into the kitchen where we leisurely make coffee and our abundant breakfasts. I might leave the water on too long while washing fruit, because well, it is not something we have to worry about. We make our lunches, if not, we just buy something and head off to work. We both have a 45 minute one way commute, I go North, Ed goes south, while the dog sits in our empty house all day, lounging on the two couches or her chair looking into yet another spare bedroom that we use as our main guest bedroom. She might drink out of the toilet of our other bathroom downstairs, as she prefers that to her water dish. We both drive home, I take the dog for a run and we go about our nightly business, again at a leisurely pace either making dinner or going out for dinner. We go to bed and start the routine all over again the next day. I know mundane right? But at the same time it is completely and utterly asinine.
It is completely and utterly asinine that I get to do this routine every day when so many people right now have no place to sleep, no place to go, not place to bath or shower (my fruit gets washed every day, yet these people are not granted the same decency as my flipping fruit), no place to change their child's diaper if they even have a clean one on hand. If they wake up in their own homes they get to spend the day on edge praying they are not shelled, or kidnapped on their way to work, if they are lucky enough to have work. They get to eat if they are lucky enough to be in a region where they can receive aid from a humanitarian group. Every day is literal game of life and death. I cannot even comprehend the feelings that come with fighting for your life and family every single day. To the point where getting into a flimsy boat to travel to a foreign land is a better and safer option than staying in your homeland. It is completely and utterly asinine that I was lucky enough to be born to Pat and Patty of the United States of America and not Rehan and Abdullah Kurdi of Kobani, Syria. (If you are unfamiliar or unsympathetic to the civilians caught in Kobani, here, this should change your mind if you have heart, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Koban%C3%AE)
I will have mercy and spare you the pictures of Mr. and Mrs Kurdi's drowned 3 year old son Alyan, and do not worry there are no pictures of their 5 year old son, Galip who also drowned along with their mother Rehan. Do you think she tried to save them or at the very least do you think she died trying to hold her babies as they also perished in the waters of the Mediterranean. A sea rife with yachts and luxury party islands on the other side This morning my routine was disrupted because I wept as I drove to work for them. I wept with the photographer who took the photo as he choked up talking about little Alyan's shoes and how they reminded him of his own 2 sons' shoes. I wept because it also reminded me of my little 3 year old nephew's shoes. Three year old children still need their food cut up, they still need to be soothed by their parents, they copy everything you say and look to their trusted adults for love and protection. It is not different for Alyan or his brother Galip. We, us adults, we let them down and countless others who are in desperate need of literal life saving mercy. Mercy we refuse to grant.
You see, we seem to jealously guard our space. Our resources are ours and ours alone. I would have gladly taken that family or any other family from Syria into my home. Our Greek brothers and sisters in humanity who have little themselves and it has been like that for years, would have welcomed their boat on the island of Kos, feed them what they could, supplied them with what they could while they wait for the rest of Europe to decide. This has been documented and it gives me hope. Yet every day the EU fights over what to do, more children will die, along with their parents, or aunts and uncles. More girls will be kidnapped by ISIS, more men in many countries killed because they are the wrong ethnicity or religion. They could be saved if we could just open up our spaces to them. If we could just give them the chance to live.
It is disturbing to see the comments on this. Comments by EU politicians, comments by people reading articles about this. You see, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary whittles it down to the simple fact that these refugees are not Christian. Gasp!!! Excuse me while I swoon. What I fail to see is how that means anything when it comes to life and death situations. But it seems many want to go there, just read the comment American's posit on the situation. It makes me ashamed, it makes me sick to my stomach and it takes away the sliver of hope for humanity. I am tired of seeing people bitch and complain about immigrants, migrants, refugees. All we do is bitch and moan about others simply because they are others. Do you honestly think people take the idea lightly of leaving everything they know behind. Their heritage, their homes, their families. We think so highly of ourselves to honestly believe that everyone comes here to just take from us? Take what is ours, because we were lucky enough to be born here in America where most of us have no idea what the struggle for life and death is like. Who cares if they are not of the Christan faith, we have the opportunity to help yet we deny that help. Austria denies that help. The United Kingdom denies that help. All the while little boys like Alyan and Galip are drowning in the same sea where the bikini clad rich take their yachting vacations. It makes me gag. My life is completely and utterly asinine because I feel helpless when I could be helping. Western Europe, America, Canada and all the industrial nations have been complicit in the cause of their situation and now we sit back acting stunned that this is the result. And many of us cannot be bothered to open our hearts with the least amount of empathy or sympathy because these people are not the right "religion." Or they are migrants and they are just here to take what is rightfully ours. If there was ever a God above, the one that we preach about in our bibles, the one who we claim to live our lives by, the one whose son is supposedly "in our hearts" who guides our everyday actions, what would he think? What did Gandhi once say? Oh yeah, "Act like Christ, not a Christian." How apt in this situation.
I am very angry. I am angry that so many refuse to help. I am angry that we have to bring up religion as a justification for our horrific actions. It is extremely upsetting that we constantly have to bring up religion all the time for many things, but this? Do not even get me started on the money. The decrying of our monetary aid, as if that is our sole contribution to this and we "spend too much of it already as is." If money and religion guide every principle, then we should have an abundance of both to help. I am angry that the burden of help has been graciously and generously picked up by those who have the least to spare and yet do it on daily basis, when the rest of us sit around arguing over whom this "burden" belong to. For the love of God, it is all of ours to bear and bear it we must. If we cannot find rooms in our hearts to help those in desperate need than what does that say of humanity? If we can not imagine what their lives must be like, what does that say about our own psyche or our souls? When it is a matter of life and death for so many, should money or religion even matter? I am confused as to why Germany can open their country to 800,000 and Canada cannot grant one family asylum? (That was the Kurdi families destination, though they were denied entry into the county, denied asylum, denied safety. Denied reunification with other family members. Denied the chance to live.) Why the Greeks can buy what extra food they can to meet with the refugees flooding their beaches, or the Spanish Coast Guard saving boats everyday, but England can only admit one refugee? Why America cannot accept plane loads of refugees when people like my husband and myself asininely have so much, too much? These people are teachers, doctors, lawyers, artists, manual laborers just like we are. They are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, who just want to survive. They are human beings first and foremost, who just were unlucky enough to be born in a time where war tore everything they know apart. We need to start treating them with the dignity all humans deserve, especially human beings in need of desperate help.
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