A New Deal

You see this is the thing you have to keep in your mind at all times: people are exactly like you and your friends.  Let me say that again, people are good, people are selfish, people are smokers, people are stupid, people are neurotic, people are fun to be around, people are desperate, people are kind, people are generous, people love other people, people can be mean, people can be frightening, people can do things that are more extraordinary than you could imagine ever; in short everyone in this world is exactly like your friends and family.  

People want to go out and see the world and then go home, they don't typically ever want to move more than a days travel from everyone and everything they know.  But people are people, they will move if they have to, but generally it has to be something extraordinary, to get them to move.  When you see someone who has left home forever, something extraordinary has happened to them.  My friend WaifGirl has decided to leave her home for another country far away because of something extraordinary for her, love.  Millions of people are fleeing their homes because of extraordinary fear of death.  

The key here is that they are people.  They are strangers, they are different in many ways, but primarily, they are people.  People like your friends and family. They love, they are kind, they bleed, they get cold, they are afraid.  They are people like you and me.  I will not say there is nothing to fear from these tired and scared people, because they are people.  Because people sometimes do horrible things to each other, families sometimes do horrible things to each other.  The overwhelming majority of bad things that have happened to people by people have been by people that the person knows.  So, you should not fear these strangers anymore than you fear your family and friends.  

These people are not typically driving or flying to safety.  They are walking or actually running.  Sometimes they get on boats, but they are mostly just walking.  And they are trying to get to safety, but they also want to go home or they want to be in an area that is familiar to them, places that are familiar, places where people speak the same language and share similar beliefs.  So, most of the people who are fleeing their homes, flee to a neighbouring less dangerous place.  Most of the refugees from Syria, fled to Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Turkey.  There are millions of them though, there are over a million refugees in Lebanon, population 4 million.  Look around you, every fifth person is a refugee.  Jordan has 670 thousand, population of 6 million; every tenth person is a refugee.  Turkey has 800 thousand refugees, with a population of 75 million, or one in every hundred is a refugee.

Europe has 680 thousand refugees and a population of 742 million people, that is one in a thousand people is a refugee.  Canada is now bringing over 25 thousand refugees, it has 35 million people, that is less than one refugee per thousand people.  The USA, a nation built on migration, is accepting 10 thousand and it has over 300 million people in it.  Ontario, has a population of 13 million and is accepting 10 thousand refugees.  Most of those will head to the Toronto Area, population 6 million.  But really, they don't want to be here, they want to be in the home that they started with five years ago.  They don't want to be in Europe, Canada, Lebanon, Jordan or Turkey.  Most of them would go back if there was a chance, for some going back would be worse, back to the place where they saw people they knew and love butchered, murdered and gassed; do you know anyone who would?  

Last Saturday, I was sitting in a Tim Hortons and a a woman in a hijab came in, she had dark skin and the men who came in were also very dark, so they were probably Pakistani or Bangladeshi or Indonesian, but they could have haled from southern Iraq too. There was a very brief visceral concern for my safety, I mean she could have had a suicide belt under her clothing.  It ended right there, it was just for a second, beneath the form obscuring clothing was a thin woman, a person.  A person like me or a friend.  Someone who was more like me than not like me, she was in Tim Hortons after all!  

If you want to read about the terror attacks read this: https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z12gyrah5xb0ilowl04cghl5dpa2ytui4wg0k?cbp=rce0ox1bc3fw&sview=27&cid=5&soc-app=115&soc-platform=1&spath=%2Fapp%2Fbasic%2Fa%2Fautoload%2F%2BYonatanZunger%2Fposts&sparm=cbp%3D1vl6lgyc9wrzk%26sview%3D27%26cid%3D5%26soc-app%3D115%26soc-platform%3D1%26stct%3DCg0Q8pOI3JekyQIgACgBEhQIABDgoYHei6DJAhiAtP_iiZTJAhgCIAwol-6U3Zqk45qZAQ

It is a very good more comprehensive take on what happened and why than I could provide.

What people have to understand is that people are people and that the people around you would never do anything like the people who attacked Beirut, Paris, or Yemen.  Yes the people who did those things were people too, but they were not average people.  And the things that they did are not unique to one group of people and not others.  The first airplane bombing was done in Canada, by a Canadian on other Canadians.  The Oklahoma Bombers were American born Americans.  Hitler was a white dude.  Because of them, do white people fear white people?  They should, but they don't.  If you don't fear white people you should not fear anyone else.  

There is a solution to end terrorism.  There is only one solution.  A two pronged attack.  Send in the troops armed with ballot boxes and freedom from oppression. Send money.  The root of these problems in Syria were obvious, they paralleled the problems in Afghanistan.   In Afghanistan, money was pumped in to the nation to resist an oppressor and vanished with the oppressor gone, leaving the people poor and under control of people with lots of guns and resentful of the people who used to pay them.  They attacked us and we attacked them and nothing was solved.  Troops went in and destabilized the country and wrecked the feeble economy and destroyed the peoples livelihoods.  

In Syria, people rebelled against oppression and were ignored.  Some of the people took aid from people who were offering it, the poor people that the West destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan and then the oppressed became the oppressors and attacked the West and then we attacked them.  And created more people that hate the West and pushed 20% of them out as refugees into the world.  And pushed another 30% of Syrians out of their homes to different parts of Syria.  We are creating the next set of terrorists by not acting correctly now.

We need to stop e oppression where it exists.  Syria for sure, Saudi Arabia as well.  We need to pony up with some real cash and raise the infrastructure of these nations, all nations.  A Modern Marshal Plan.  Trillions of dollars, wind farms, solar collectors, Family Planning, improved Health Care, luxury goods, education.  Do You Understand?  For the cost of The War in Iraq, we could prevent the need for other similar wars, keep people in their own countries and focus on the truly scary stuff that no one can focus on because of this minor stuff.

Refugees fleeing war will be nothing compared to refugees fleeing environmental collapse.  130 dead will be nothing compared to billions littering the ground due to starvation and affixation.