Falling Trees

I’ve had writer’s block.  Did you notice?  No shortage of topic, more a weariness of style.  Sometimes I feel too positive in my offerings, too relentlessly uplifting.  I’ve grown negative about my positivity, pessimistic about my optimism, discouraged in my encouragement.  And dulled by lack of reader response.  Time for furlough, methinks.  Hunker down.  Take refuge in other writing.

Which seems appropriate, given that we’ve just skirted UN Refugee Day.  June 20^th each year, for no obvious reason.  This year’s theme: ‘Hope Away From Home’.

The plight of the refugee is especially moving and deserves our attention.  Refugees, says the UN Commission for Refugees, are “forcibly displaced people worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order”.
There’s an unlimited variety of forms of injustice in the world, of course – from systemic to familial to domestic to political, and all shades besides.  But refugeeism must be one of the most unfair, miserable of all injustices.  Not just unjust in itself, but anteroom to other shades of injustice, like abuse, mistreatment, neglect, trafficking; and the strong possibility of dying in the desert, in the snow, or on the ocean.  Imagine living a relatively normal life – even if impoverished and lacking opportunity or material favour – but calmish, safe, even happy.  Then, for absolutely no fault of your own, whatever you do have is wiped out.  Everything is lost and you are on the street, on the run, exposed, unprotected by any exterior cover, left entirely to your own perhaps non-existent resources.  Probably having witnessed or experienced things no human being should ever experience or witness, so that even if things improve, you will permanently live with the memory or the imagery or the scars of utter loss.  Loved ones, home, security, education … hope. 

People – men and women like you and me – among the most aggrieved and abandoned souls on our sorry planet.

Yet there is so little anyone can do, eh.  Even the UN, and other dedicated agencies.  For manifold reasons.  The record 110 million refugees (struck last week by an upsurge in Sudanese refugees) are virtually on their own.
New Zealand, regrettably, doesn’t pull its weight in the global refugee crisis.  We’re supposed to welcome 1500 refugees per year here.  A paltry number in the scheme of things, when places in Europe and the Middle East are overwhelmed with them.

More than half of all refugees come from Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine (and 90% of Ukrainian refugees are unaccompanied women and children).  38% of refugees are hosted in just five countries: Turkey, Iran, Columbia, Germany and Pakistan.  Turkey hosts 3.6 million.  Lebanon hosts the largest number of refugees per capita and per square kilometre in the world, with an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees on top of their own 5 million indigenous population.  Think of that – same population as Aotearoa New Zealand, in a much smaller land area, and they’ve got 1.5 million refugees.  We receive 1500!  There are nearly a million in Bangladesh – Rohingya people – and Bangladesh, half the size of New Zealand, has 160 million of its own citizens!

Such a blight on noble humankind.

Yet, still only a subset of the innocent at large.  The innocenti.  The innocent are the vast swathes of people – individuals and groups – who lack basic need or basic rights, freedom or health, warmth or comfort, sustenance or shelter, human love – or humanity itself.  People who, through no fault of their own, suffer without relief:

• the child of an alcoholic father
• the wife of a fallen Ukrainian soldier
• the Afghan woman hiding in a hessian-walled outhouse
• the teenager in an Iranian prison for not wearing a headscarf
• the Gujarati woman unmarried because she has no dowry
• the homeless veterans of futile wars
• the father who’s just buried his son, dead of lymph sarcoma
• the Filipino drug mule in a Singaporean prison cell
• the American nurse in an ISIS cage
• the Columbian family who’s lost everything in a mudslide, or a rebel raid
• the Turkish man crushed and trapped under a pancaked apartment block
• the newborn left on the church steps
• the Yazidis, the Dalits, the Rohingya; or the rebels in Idlib or Chin State who just want a fair go
• …..

This is a shameful list.  Shameful just because the list exists.  In our world.  And it goes on without end.
These are the arenas of injustice that don’t get enough attention in liberal conversations about injustice, much less resolution. It’s these innocenti who are the (barely) living evidence that we humans, we homo sapiens, are uncivilised Barbarians, and we all jointly bear the guilt, by our membership of the species.
My heart aches helplessly for them, wishfully, and my soul prays without ceasing … for the innocents of our world.

Join me?

So, the tree falls in the forest.  For a time.  Did you hear it?

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The answer, according to Dr. George Berkeley, Anglican Bishop and philosopher (1685–1753), is that, “Yes, it did make a sound, because God heard it.”