The dictionary defines 'diaspora' in multiple ways, but the one meaning that seems appropriate at present is 'displacement' and it is here and happening now.
As the climate continues it shift towards becoming more and more deadly, we are seeing it happen almost as if we were standing on a street corner and watching as cars and trucks slam into each other creating a giant pile-up. The storms are becoming more frequent and more violent and massively destructive. The wild fires in the west are simply out of control. The drought that may culminate in some very scary crop failures is happening in various parts of the country. I just saw a news item on how low the reservoirs in northern California are......i.e. never been this bad. And, we haven't even mentioned the pandemic that continues to ravage the planet.
It was announced just yesterday that we have surpassed the death toll exacted by the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918. So, we're at almost 700,000 and counting. We blew by the death tolls of every war America has participated in, and I noted that when we passed the World War II toll of 405,000.
The simple truth is that larger and larger areas of the planet are rapidly becoming uninhabitable. There is no longer any ability to sustain life in these regions....no water, no crops. Disease and despotic leaders have come to the fore and it's going to get a whole lot worse before it even shows the possibility of improving. These people from Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, and on and on...did not walk out of their humble dwellings to begin a foot journey of incredible danger and difficulty on a whim. They did so because they have lost any hope that they would survive if they remained where they were. It was clear to them that they had no future where their families have lived for many generations.
So, the inevitable result of this tsunami of hopelessness.....is a diaspora. It won't stop anytime soon, because these poor souls are between a rock and a hard place, i.e. stay and die, or go and perhaps die anyway. But, most of them still have the courage and the stamina to cling to HOPE. On the outside chance that they will survive the journey, the crime and hunger, the exposure to the elements...and even endure being whipped with the reins of an officer's horse, as he tries to force them back away from crossing the border. (You may have seen this happen just a few days ago.) These people still carry on. Nobody who has an ounce of human compassion can watch footage of this crisis and remain dry-eyed.
It's far too easy to conjecture that they just envy America and Americans and want what we have. How dare they? What they want so desperately is to have a life with some even slight hope for a future. Can you even imagine what it would be like to be in their situation? How does one lift their head on awakening each morning and face a day like they do? At present, the souls huddled under the bridge in Del Rio Texas, are enduring furnace-like heat, privations of every kind, watching their children die from very preventable causes and knowing that the next thing that happens could well be being sent back to the hell that they gambled with their lives to escape.
And, a whole lot of Americans just fear these people, are willing to stuff them right back where they came from because of the imagined threat they pose to our way of life.
Once again, we are at a moral crossroads: either we can treat these people with kindness and compassion and do what we can to ease what they are and have gone through.......or we can just play hardball and tell ourselves that it's their tough luck to be them. Ayn Rand would be delighted with that option, eh. SUCKS TO BE YOU.
I am still not ready to believe that is who we really are....as a nation or as people.
But, I am starting to slide in that direction........................
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| Hell comes in many forms.... |
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