A travel experience caused Dr. Jed Diamond to reflect on the staggering amount of refugees and displaced persons in our world today.
—
A few years ago my wife, Carlin, and I went to visit our son who now lives with his wife and children in the Czech Republic. On our way we decided to do some traveling and took a train through France and Spain on our way to Czech. It was not a good experience. There were delays, unhelpful train employees, difficulty with the language. For the first time I got a small glimpse of what it might be like to be a refugee who has to leave their country and make their way in a foreign land.
It was clear that many people didn’t have the time or inclination to be helpful. They either ignored our pleas for help or gave us information that was unhelpful just to get rid of us. One ticket attendant sold us a train ticket that turned out would not get us where we needed to go. We were stuck between towns for a day. On the other hand there were people who went out of their way to be helpful. When a train was delayed an attendant got us bag lunches. A gesture of kindness from a stranger meant the world to us when we were tired, frightened, confused, and worried.
As systems breakdown throughout the world more and more people are on the move. I just read a fascinating article by Dmitry Orlov, author of The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors’ Toolkit, offering his unique perspective on what is causing so many people to be on the move. He says,
“The world is awash in refugees, displaced persons, asylum-seekers and immigrants, illegal and otherwise. They number is somewhere around 50 million, and around half of them are children.”
Unlike my wife and I who were traveling for pleasure and would return to our nice safe home, most refugees leave home because of crime, violence, poverty, and food shortages. These are long term problems that cause people to become stressed, depressed, and in poor health.
As a psychotherapist I help individuals, couples, and families deal with the stresses in their lives so that they can be healthier and more joyful. But having worked with people for more than 40 years I know that if we don’t attend to the larger social issues that face us in the world, individuals, couples, and families will become overwhelmed and break down.
Orlov offers the following list of countries and asks what they have in common:
- Afghanistan
- El Salvador
- Guatemala
- Honduras
- Iraq
- Mexico
- Somalia
- Syria
- Ukraine
“These are all countries,” says Orlov, “that were invaded, sanctioned, exploited, or otherwise heavily messed with by none other than the United States.”
Most of us are aware of the refugees coming into the U.S. from Mexico. I recently watched a 60-Minute special on the huge influx of refugees, particularly children. The report said that most of the children were coming through Mexico from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
They reported an increasing problem at the border with so many children coming across. I wondered why so many kids were leaving their homes and facing untold dangers and privations? What is going on at home that is driving them out? Related to this Orlov says,
“Mexico fell victim to the U.S. war on drugs. The ways in which Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras have been undermined and exploited by U.S. policies run the gamut from arming and training death squads to sending in missionaries that preach against birth control.”
We’re living at a time of massive change. We live on a finite planet, with limited resources. For at least 6,000 years humans have viewed the Earth as our own private bread basket. We’ve done our best to extract more and more of the resources for human consumption. As a result our population is growing exponentially and we’re running up against our limits. We’re taking more than our fair share and other species we share the Earth with are dying out.
As writer and environmentalist Richard Heinberg says in his book Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines,
“It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we have caught ourselves on the horns of the Universal Ecological Dilemma, consisting of the interlinking elements of population pressure, resource depletion, and habitat destruction.”
There seems to be two possible solutions to our dilemma. One is that those in power can try and secure as much of the earth’s remaining resources for themselves. That seems to be the position of the government-military-industrial complex. We are trying to secure the world’s remaining oil and gas supplies as well as other resources. This is creating more and more conflict, wars, violence, and refugees fleeing their homes in order to survive.
The second solution is to learn to live in balance with the earth’s resources, to recognize that we can be happy using a lot less and that our own survival depends on the survival of all our fellow travelers on Spaceship Earth, as Buckminster Fuller called our “small, beautiful, planet.” We can’t continue to take more than our fair share. People resent it and will fight back in order to survive.
When we were going to war to protect the oil resources, there was a quip, “How did our oil get under their sand?” Now we seem to be going into one country after another undermining their local economies and taking more for our multinational corporations… and then we act surprised when people are driven out of their homes and sneak across the borders looking for a better life in the U.S.
Orlov adds,
“Most Americans seem quite incapable of making the simple connection between destroying somebody’s house and having that somebody then move in to share yours.”
There will never be enough resources to “secure our borders.” I think we need to be kind to all the refugees who we encounter. Most of us are not that far from being homeless ourselves. At the same time we need to learn to live within our limits and stop taking more than our fair share of the resources of the world.
My work has been focused on helping men and the women who love them. I specialize in helping men deal with depression and other emotional distresses. I think there’s some truth to the quote by comedian Elayne Boosler:
“When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. It’s a whole different way of thinking.”
I think it would do us all well to eat less, shop less, and invade less. What do you think?
Like The Good Men Project on Facebook
–Photo: un_photo/Flickr
Turn the Vatican into a homeless shelter. Jesus didn’t need a home that large or ornate.
Wes, I suspect there a lot of large homes available in he world that aren’t being used.
Great post. Humanity restored. I guess you’re right, we need to be kind to the refugees. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Angela, On some level we are all refugees forced out of an old world order that has come to feel like home, even though it is unsustainable and dysfunctional. Those who are most attached to the old order cling to it mightily. We all have to get off the “sinking ship of empire” and board the “lifeboats of earth community.” We can no longer live on the Earth as though it were for human use only. We can no longer take more than our fair share. The good news is getting off the old ship allows us to reclaim a… Read more »