Last night, as I watched “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, I saw an image that will haunt me for a long time: It was a photo of a 3-year-old refugee boy who had died on a beach in Turkey.
This is what I saw:
As a parent, I cannot imagine such a tragedy befalling my daughter. But if we were also in the middle of a war as brutal as the one currently taking place in Syria, wouldn’t I make every effort to get her to a safer location? Of course I would, even if it cost me my own life.
Tens of thousands of refugees have fled the constant fighting in Syria, and, shamefully, many governments have moved to block their entry. Even more shamefully, the United States has only agreed to take 1,000 Syrian refugees since the war began in 2011. That’s about 250 a year. And it is to our own shame that we have not done more.
Some may ask, What do these people want from us? We cannot take every refugee who seeks asylum, no matter the reason. I suppose Donald Trump would declare them all drug dealers, rapists, or terrorists.
Leave it to a child to most perfectly express what these refugees want. As a 13-year-old boy from Syria told a reporter:
“You just stop the war, and we don’t want to go to Europe.”
Can the war in Syria be stopped? It doesn’t appear so, and I am less than eager to see us get involved in yet another conflict in the Middle East. But can’t we at least make an attempt to let more of these refugees come into the United States as a humanitarian gesture? Isn’t that the least we can do since we do not want to be part of a quagmire which could go on for years?
There are some problems that are so complex they cannot be easily solved. But there is also the basic human decency which should compel us all to reach out to those who simply want to live in peace and security.
Syrian boy (13) tells police in #Hungary: “Just stop the war. We won’t want to come to Europe” https://t.co/yOJ77y3FxO via @CVerenkotte #fb
— Mirjam Fischer (@imillenari) September 2, 2015
