Thought for Thursday - Compassion

Over the past few weeks we have been bombarded by images of human suffering. Pictures of dead children, families on the edge of despair, bombed out communities. Seemingly endless television reports about a tide of humanity escaping from conflict, poverty, prejudice and oppression. It has been hard to watch and listen and has left many of us feeling helpless.

Compassion for our fellow humans is something that I always assumed most people felt. After all, there but for the grace of God go I, as the saying goes. But it seems that I was wrong. Not everyone has felt compassionate towards the people on our screens. Some countries have tried to stop them entering their territory; others have herded them on to trains like cattle and rushed them across the border to become someone else's problem. People who have fled the unimaginable are turned away, left to fend for themselves, abandoned by our so-called civilised society.

I have no idea what the answer is. I have no idea what any country should do about this crisis. I have no idea what I should do, or even if there is anything one woman in England can do. But I do think we should be dealing with these people with compassion. We should be trying, however hard it is, to put ourselves in their place. I can't imagine how desperate they must feel to attempt a journey across the Mediterranean in a tiny dinghy; I can't imagine dragging my child across deserts and borders to escape persecution; I can't imagine being so scared for my life that I would allow myself and my family to be loaded into a truck to be smuggled into a foreign country. But I do know that I would do almost anything to protect those I love and that is what the people we see on our TV screens and read about in our newspapers are doing.

What makes me angry about this situation is the way some societies are failing these people. Most Middle Eastern states have done nothing to help. They aren't allowing refugees to settle in their countries, they aren't even allowing their citizens to adopt Syrian orphans. How can they turn their backs on their fellow Arabs, their fellow Muslims, their fellow human beings?

I have stayed away from the social media chatter about this subject. I'm still struggling to decide how I feel about the possibility of the RAF bombing targets in Syria; I'm still trying to make my mind up about how the United Kingdom should respond to the refugees camping at Calais; I'm still trying to decide what I think the EU and UN should be doing about the biggest movement of humanity since World War 2.  These are big questions to think about and in my opinion too big and personal to be condensed into 140 characters.

I am worried that the saturation coverage is leading to compassion fatigue, in the same way that it did in the early 1990s about the famine in Ethiopia. I hope a solution is found soon and all the people who are currently trying to find a safe place to live are welcomed into a community and allowed to live peaceful, productive, happy lives with their families. I also hope that the countries they are fleeing from return to peace and no-one else feels the need to risk their lives escaping across continents. Let's all open our hearts to the refugees and treat them with dignity and compassion wherever they end up.