I
am thinking about the fragility of civilization. Look around you, at the
building you are in, the road you travel on. What you see was made by people
who agreed that they would get up in the morning and go to work and nobody
would shoot at them or fire mortars at them; there would not be checkpoints at
which they could be taken out and never seen again; that there would be food in the shops, and
water in the taps, and shoes to buy and to wear. People who believed that the
place you go to sleep tonight will be here tomorrow.
There
are now 50 million refugees in the world today, more than at any time since the
end of the Second World War. And at some point, for each one of these people,
the world shifted. Their world, solid and predictable, erupted or dissolved
into chaos or danger or pain. They realized that they had to run.
You
have two minutes to pack. You can only take what you can carry easily. You are
going to have to walk a long way. You hope that somewhere, someone is going to
take you in.
I
have started to think of humanity as family; a family that quarrels, but which
must, when things get hard, put aside
old arguments and divisions and care for each other. Sometimes someone needs
somebody to take them in, and that’s the function of family. It’s time to care.
You
have two minutes to run. What will you take with you?
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