Why Do People Hate Refugees?
And why they’d better stop since we all can become refugees once
This is the story of a team of young people from the second-largest city in Ukraine. They were happy, wealthy and healthy, living their best lives until the 24th of February, when all of them had to leave the city looking for a safe place, living in rooms for 10 people god-knows-where, staying with numerous other families in kindergartens to survive the night and becoming refugees. You know them — this is our team by the way.
This is a story of a young couple with hopes for the future, 2 rats, 1 dog, and 1 snake, who were painting with oil, living in the city center and loving each other. Both of them had to save their parents, and adopt left animals and despite staying till the end mode they finally had to leave the city since bombs were falling just around their home. Who are they? Wealthy young startup owners from Kharkiv.
This is the story of the girl, who was practising yoga every day, reading books on philosophy and saving children in Africa. She had to leave a week after the war started since all windows in her house were broken during another shelling. Who is she? Now — refugee in Poland.
DJs, artists, musicians, writers, local millionaires — all of them were running away without anything simply to stay alive. Anyone can become a refugee at any moment. Do you know the fear of burning down while sleeping? Do you know the fear of running away without even clothes because bombs are blowing around? Do you know the noise when the bomb is flying over your house? We do. That’s why we are here.
Stop Hate
The world appeared at this point — the point, when the history of the XXth century repeats — not accidentally. We all need to become kinder, only then we can make this world a better place.
Who Are Refugees?
Refugees are people who fled their own country due to war or politically dangerous situations and another country accepted them as refugees. By the way, it’s not that easy to get refugee status, since you have to wait for weeks until your request will be approved and another country will accept you. Moreover, you’re getting checked in detail before getting a refugee status. So we are not just random people coming on boats from nowhere.
Inner refugees also come through a lot:
- hate from neighbors
- disability to find the job
- mental issues
- social isolation
These are difficulties inner refugees go through despite the fact they didn’t even flee their country but simply moved to the neighboring city.
War is not the only thing that made people move across the country. Before the war there also were university issues, schools, divorces and 1 000 000 other reasons why people were moving to different cities. However, they never had this much hate those who were bombed are getting. Is this fair? Not at all.
We Are Not Dangerous
Why do refugees become dangerous? In fact, hate borns hate, so people who come to the country try to find those who understand them and those who will not be hating them. That’s how people unite in ghettos. Living in ghettos, isolated from the rest of society, people almost lose the chance to assimilate. They become distanced from a healthy society. They live their own lives. Finally, people hate them even more and they hate people back since they never will be able to understand why society never accepted them though the government did.
That’s how refugees may become potentially dangerous. However, they have still never made any revolution or anything serious in history. So dangerous refugees are nothing but the yellow papers slogans.
How to Talk and Help
To stop making hate popular, people can just talk to refugees and take them as a normal part of society. How can you talk to someone who lost everything and seems very isolated?
- show support
- understanding
- do not be too active and annoying
- start small
Take this like making friends with someone new to you. One supported child or person may save a lot of people. Only by sharing good and kind things, we may get rid of wars and people will never have to run from their countries.
By the way, we keep on helping people who lost their houses due to the war in Ukraine by providing them housing, psychologist, HR, and social worker for free to help families earn and recover, building a healthy society together. You may help to donate on vsimdim.org