On the Syrian Refugees

Every day I read the news, and every day I see another story like this. Another story where the United States, a country that relative to the size of its population and economy already underserves the world’s refugee population, takes another step to deny entry to millions of Syrian refugees fleeing the war-torn hellscape which their native land has become.

And it breaks my heart.

It tears me apart to think that we, as a society, can so callously turn our backs on those so desperately in need. It makes me want to grab all of humanity collectively and shake them and yell until I’m hoarse.

CAN YOU NOT SEE?!

Can you not see the unbelievable cognitive dissonance inherent in telling innocent people that in order for us to be safe from ISIS, we must shunt them back into ISIS territory? Can you not see that they, the people fleeing ISIS and Assad, are the very people the Islamic State most wants to exterminate from the face of the Earth? Can you not see that by refusing to take refugees, we sentence these people to a life to which we wouldn’t subject our worst enemy?

But most of all, can you not see yourself? When you think of the refugees — and really the institutionally oppressed all over the world — are you so unable to consider that, but for an accident of birth, that could be you?

Because I can’t stop thinking it.

I can’t stop thinking about how I would feel if I were desperately searching for safe harbor, only to be turned away because I share nothing more than a skin color, an ethnicity, or a religion with a select few individuals who are capable of committing acts of an unfathomable monstrosity.

I see mothers and children trying to escape circumstances more desperate than I could ever comprehend. And I see them being called potential terrorists. Rabid dogs. Diseases. “Muslim prime time soldiers.” Then I think of my own mother and my own siblings. And it hurts.

Because that could be any of us. We did nothing to deserve our positions at birth; we have no more right to the privileges afforded by citizenship in a liberal democratic state than do those born in depressive or oppressive situations. Our lives hold no more intrinsic value than those of anyone else.

But we don’t use our position of power to assist others who were not so lucky at birth. Instead, we weaponize our extrinsic privilege in conflicts both political and personal. Our politicians prey on nativist sentiment to exploit impulsive jingoistic convictions; our citizens perpetuate nasty prejudices and reflexive distrust towards those different from ourselves.

I do not seek to belittle or otherwise fail to consider the lives lost and the families and communities torn apart by terrorism. Terrorism is cowardly, desperate, disgusting, and we have a moral obligation both to fight it to the best of our abilities, and to comfort and protect its victims.

But the true power of terrorism lies not in the lives it takes or the damage it sows. The true power of terrorism is its ability to compel us to regress to our basest, most xenophobic predispositions. To our most reductive tendencies, and to our most alienating heuristics. Terrorists thrive on the marginalization of subgroups; terrorism succeeds when it marshals that collective estrangement into resentment and ultimately a violent response.

I want so, so badly to believe in the inherent goodness of people. I want to believe that our mortal condition engenders a certain level of compassion and empathy commensurate with our shared fundamental humanity. I want to believe that the strands of our common moral fiber cannot be so easily ripped at the seams by the actions of a desperate and reprehensible few.

But I don’t know anymore. The more I read, the sadder I become. And the differences between what humanity should be, and what humanity empirically is, seem further and further irreconcilable.

Some of the refugees that we turn away, despite being fully capable of taking them in, will die. Families will be torn apart, forced to endure in a collapsed state that today is little more than an interminable, bloody battleground.

Their blood is, at least in part, on our hands. But we no longer seem to care.