Imagine that you are sitting at your desk at home. It’s so cluttered you barely have room to place your laptop down. You promise yourself to clean it later. You haven’t eaten anything since lunch, aside from a snack, and you’re a bit hungry. You groan when you see that there’s only some food inside the fridge, stuff you like but not what you feel like eating at that moment. Back at your desk, you can’t get yourself to start your homework, so you go online. You see headline after headline about some crisis about refugees from Syria, but you just scroll past because, frankly, you don’t even know where Syria is. Then you remember all of the homework you have and you say, “Ugh, my life sucks.”
Imagine now that you are fleeing for your life.
Hours earlier you stood in your room, an empty backpack in hand and five minutes to choose what to take before you had to run. You were in a hurry, but not to catch the school bus, a flight, or a ride. You grabbed a toothbrush and a change of clothes, took a last look at the place you slept in for the past twelve years, and go.
Where are you going? You don’t know but follow your parents, who put on a fake front and a fake smile, and you board train after train, squished against strangers, neighbors, friends, family, each with one bag in hand or nothing at all. You wonder when you are going to have your next proper meal, not just rationed bits of food and water that you have to walk hours just to get. You wonder who will make it and who will not after all of this, even as you try to push the dreaded thought out of your mind. You wonder where you are going, but no one has any idea. They all say, though, you are headed toward a safe haven, a country where there is no need to hide from bombs, no need to think of where you are going next, no need to pray for your life every day.
This is the life of a Syrian refugee. This is the life, or the best that I can make out from what the news has told us, of the four million people and more pouring out of the tiny Middle Eastern country every day. Syria's civil war and its effects are the worst humanitarian crisis of our time. The refugees flee their country, but they are fleeing much more than that.
They are fleeing the past, when they lived passively under the regime of Al-Assad, a despot wearing the name-tag of a president who has killed more Syrians than the Islamic State militants have. They are fleeing the present, where they are citizens caught amid the bloodshed of rebels and their regime as the two clash in a fight for power. They are fleeing the future, the threat of ISIS, a terrorist group so utterly destroying and disturbing, one that has already encroached on the most ancient of Syrian property.
Syria’s civil war is the worst humanitarian crisis of our time. Since its onset in 2011, nine million people have fled their homes. More than half of those are children. While some were internally displaced within the country, many have fled to other countries. Turkey currently shelters over 1.9 million, the highest in the world, with Lebanon right behind it at 1.1 million. Jordan and Iraq have also taken in refugees, but none of their oil-rich Gulf country neighbors, such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have even given refugees a second thought. Europe is another place many refugees are famously heading toward now.
“We accept that every person has a right to seek asylum,” Swedish Foreign Affairs Minister Margot Wallstrom said. “This also puts the European solidarity to a test. I think it’s important that we signal being a community that rests on common values of democracy and defense of human rights.”
The attitude that Sweden has taken on is close to that of Germany, which hosts just under 100,000 refugees and has pledged to host over 800,000. The United Kingdom will take in 20,000 and France 24,000 over the next five years, and many other countries are hosting and have pledged as well. The United States, surprisingly, has only pledged about 10,000. Arriving in these other countries, refugees face grueling months and even years of registration to officially seek asylum and are often unwelcome by annoyed officials and citizens.
This crisis is not anything new. Syria’s civil war has been going on for four years now, and still many people have managed to not know a single thing about it. A photo of a drowned boy washed onto Turkey’s shore shocked the world and let more and people know of the crisis and led countries to take action. However, many of us have still chosen to ignore or dismiss the crisis, thinking that Syria is too distant, too removed from us, have minimized, in our minds, the struggle of the refugees. Many of us still don’t care, but this is something we should all care about. Is it humane to ignore the suffering of others merely because of the distance between?
This is not merely a story for the news. It is not just another ignorable CNN or BBC article that only people “really into politics” care about. It’s a calamity that has been happening—and will continue— for more than four years, and there are people our own age, the ages of our siblings and our parents, who have had to pack what they could of their lives into their bags and leave the rest behind.
In the least selfish way possible, we can also think of how this affects us. This event is one to be incredibly well-documented in history, especially in this day and age, in every format, in video, in writing, in photos, and all over social media. Do we really want to be remembered in textbooks as the people who did nothing as millions fled death? Do we want to be remembered as people so selfish that we only acknowledge the horror when a photo of a dead child causes us “pain”? The refugees are normal people, people like you and me, and this is a crisis that could happen to any of us, in the near future or to our descendants.
Katherine Chen
