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Saturday, August 29, 2015

A Crisis of Epic Proportions



Those of us who live in Europe have a human crisis, and no-one is quite sure what to do about it. We have a human migration where people of Africa and the Middle East are moving into Europe like a growing human tsunami. I am an immigrant to Europe, although I am not seen as such as I arrived legally on an airplane holding a British passport. At the time that I arrived there were Africans landing on the beaches in search of a better economic life.

I always wondered who those people were. From what we understood large sums of money had been paid to the people traffickers, so they must have been people from subtantial levels of society in their homelands. In many African countries when a change of government occurs the new opposition lays bare a number of people who will simply be killed by the new intolerant administration. Those people will do well to flee for their lives.

Then came the Arab Spring and that has led to constant movement within a number of countries. We in Europe have no real idea of what is taking place on the ground. People are drowning themselves and they are dying in the desert to get away from a hell that only they know. We can't even begin to imagine what they have left behind.

Those people who are fleeing Syria are genuine war refugees. That we understand, but whether you are getting away from the Assad regime or some warlord, the end result is just the same if you are caught up in the melee...you're just as dead.

For years bodies have been fished from the Mediterranean waters, but the latest abomination is that a refrigeration truck, left parked along a highway yielded 71 dead bodies, including 4 children. Seventy-one people climbed into this truck that clearly had no ventilation, and allowed the driver to close the doors and lock them. With that simple action he deliberately snuffed out the lives of all those people. They say that desperate people do desperate things. None of us can even begin to understand this.

Some Europeans are behaving in the most shameful manner towards the migrants, particularly in Germany. However, it is a bewildering sight to have hundreds, if not thousands of people crossing your backyard. These are humans whose lives matter. They have nothing, not even a home.

The good news is that Europe actually does need more people. The question is how to turn these newcomers into productive members of society?

Copyright (c) 2015 Eugene Carmichael