Just being Human.
A Story About Borders, Bombs, and Human Compassion
Sometimes, I just can’t wrap my head around it. How people can be so cruel, so dismissive, so… racist toward migrants. I try to imagine what it must be like to leave everything you know behind—your home, your friends, your family, your routines because staying means certain death. Because bombs are dropping on your children. Because tyranny has made normal life impossible. And then, after everything, you arrive somewhere safer, hoping for a shred of mercy or kindness… and instead, you’re met with suspicion, hostility, or outright hate.
I find it hard to swallow because I keep thinking: what would I do? What would any of us do if it were our children’s lives on the line? If our homes were reduced to rubble and our cities were no longer safe? Would we stay put, pretending everything was okay, hoping somehow the world would notice our suffering? Or would we take whatever chance we could to survive even if it meant leaving everything behind and trusting strangers to help us, crossing dangerous waters, navigating borders that don’t care about us, risking everything because the only option is loss?
We often talk about migrants as if they are a problem to be managed. As if leaving their homes, their cultures, their lives behind is some choice they took lightly. But it’s not a choice it’s survival. And the harsh truth that I can’t shake is that a lot of the chaos they’re fleeing isn’t accidental. Some of it has our fingerprints all over it. Our politics, our interventions, our wars have left countries destabilized, families broken, and children traumatized. And then, when they come to our “safe” streets, we act shocked or outraged, as if it’s somehow their fault.
It’s infuriating, yes but it’s also heartbreaking. Because if I truly imagine myself in their shoes, the fear, desperation, and relentless hope become so tangible. I see parents doing everything in their power to protect their children, because nothing else matters. I see families willing to risk drowning in the sea because the alternative is death. I see people who deserve dignity, safety, and compassion being treated like a burden.
And then I think about the postcode lottery we were lucky enough to win. The only difference between “us” and “them” is where we were born. One postcode, one set of circumstances, and suddenly we’re afforded safety, stability, and the privilege of ignorance. We go about our days, sipping tea, walking dogs, working, shopping, living our ordinary lives while others are fighting to live, to breathe, to protect what little they have left. Our animals are treated with more respect and decency than even their children and that is the horrific truth .
somehow, some people can look at that, and instead of feeling empathy, they feel anger, resentment, or fear.
I can’t accept it quietly. I can’t let it sit in the back of my mind as if it’s just part of the world. It’s a moral failure, a human failure, to allow the suffering of others especially when we are in some small way complicit and then pretend it doesn’t exist. I can’t imagine living in a world where I treated fleeing humans with disdain, because in my mind, the thought of my own children in that situation is unbearable. I wouldn’t stay. I would take the first chance to get them to safety. And I cannot forgive a society that looks at other people doing the exact same thing and treats them as criminals or nuisances.
So, yes. It infuriates me. It breaks my heart. It makes me question how much humanity we’ve really claimed for ourselves if we can ignore, dismiss, or vilify people who are just trying to survive. And yet, that’s why I write about it. That’s why I reflect on it. Because the only way to honor the lives of those fleeing, the ones risking everything for survival, is to see them as human first and never let ourselves forget that the only difference between “them” and “us” is geography, or a postcode lottery.