Humanity Washed Ashore
Continuing on themes of the 21st century—has anyone
else thought about the irony:
Trainloads of humanity stuffed into railway cars trying
desperately to get INTO Germany.
Let this be a lesson to the 20th century self who
thought people can’t change, that countries are evil, that the world is
hopeless. I’m sure it felt that way 100 years ago in the trenches and 70 years
ago in the camps.
Forgiveness is never cheap or easy.
But here is a nation leading other nations to open their
borders and accept others not like them but like them in so many other ways.
Humanity washed ashore. I don’t need to post the picture of
the little 3-yr old boy face down in the surf, on the coast of Turkey to tell
you all of our hearts have to change.
After Kristallnacht German
Jews were desperate to get out, to flee what might not at first seemed like a
crisis. No one ever thought it was going to get too bad. They weren’t at first
asylum-seekers, but they knew that something was coming, a dark tide, that
would overwhelm them if they stayed. And, that only became so much clearer as
the Third Reich continued with their anti-Semitic policies.
And countries such as the US and elsewhere had quotas, only
allowing so many Jews to enter. History now tells us, we should have done more.
Will we reach out to those fleeing Syria, who have seen
their government turn on them and then radicals overrun their cities. They are
fleeing catastrophe. Or will we wait for the pages of time to tell us how late
we were, how short-sighted, how we lacked imagination—for the terror that may
befall a nation, a generation?
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