Syria, War, and Refugees: For Those Who Want to Know Why

It began with children. 15 children. They painted anti-government graffiti on the school walls. Then, they were arrested.

Some said they were tortured. Riots began. After parents tried to secure their release, CNN reported this response from a local official "Forget your children. If you really want your children, you should make more children. If you don't know how to make more children, we'll show you how to do it."

That was in 2011. And most people don’t remember it. Or don’t know about it. I only know because I was working on a case study of Syria at the time. I told my brother I was trying to figure out why Syria was lagging behind in the Arab Spring. I told him I suspected it had to do with a lack of international intervention. I found that conversation in an old google chat from March 2012.

Not much has changed. That is, on the international stage. 

But in Syria, over 4 years of conflict has brought reports of 7.6 million displaced refugees and some say 300,000 deaths.  Why?

It's a complicated issue, for sure, mixed with years of war, sectarian rivalry, dictatorial regimes, poor decisions form western leadership, and what seems to be no clear moral answer. 

So we do nothing.

Well, not quite. With the recent rise in displaced refugees, international attention is increasing. People are getting mad. And if we can’t make a coherent statement about the conflict itself, we can at least talk about the refugee problem. Yes, let’s all talk about the refugee problem.

Because the fact that this conflict began with children getting imprisoned for graffiti and ends with drowning refugee children washing up on the shores in Turkey doesn’t seem to make sense to people.

As if the problem were somehow unconnected from the source. As if international intervention in the conflict would cause ‘undue deaths’ but allowing it to perpetuate would do nothing but create a refugee problem. As if the problem were that they don't know where to go rather than the fact that it's getting too dangerous to stay. 

People need to wake up. 

We live in a world where celebrities run for president to the cheering support of entertainment morons with no occupation other than “bread and circuses.”

We live in a world where all the media attention falls to whether or not one woman in Kentucky should get jailed over what has become the controversial debate over someone's right to marry.

Yet no one even thinks about the fact that millions are struggling just to have one right: the basic right to live. Or survive, at least.

I am increasingly disgusted by a world that makes heroes of people who are dissatisfied with their looks, their pocketbook, and their gender. People obsessed with sexual liberation, lust, and instant gratification, as if all that mattered was young love and paychecks in a world painted by the blood of the innocent.

As if we can ignore conflict because the humans involved were not American humans. As if human rights didn’t extend beyond the borders of a geographic territory. Because we can somehow parade around the newly invented rights of gays. Or the need for universal healthcare. But only if you're born on American soil.

We have people running for office who rejoice in the deportation of all illegal immigrants, including children, and then turn around and declare support for Syrian refugees as if there wasn’t an inherent contradiction in the vicious rhetoric of the nationalist-turned-humanitarian.

We are a people driven by emotions and sympathies to the point that one picture of a small child, drowned in his escape suddenly brings people to look at a long-term conflict in horror and ask themselves how this could happen without ever having paid much attention to the why of the conflict.

But we know the why. It isn’t because refugees are being ignored, it’s because refugees are being created in an ignored conflict. It’s because we ignore everything that doesn’t find its way to our doorstep, clawing for attention before gasping its last as an actual victim in a real conflict rather than a falsified victim in a world of made-up rights and personally defined truths.

I’m sick of media and reality tv that turns people with potential into brainless followers of fictitious settings—giving all their sympathies to the sexual symbols on television whose only life drama is whether or not to have sex with one or two people on public television.

I’m sick of reading dystopian novels, only to realize that no one cares how true they actually are to so many areas of the world.

I’m tired of listening to uneducated opinions of people who’ve never even thought about what might be happening outside of their bubble of security, who sit in “thoughtless stupor” while thousands around them are murdered. I’m tired of hearing about the needs for higher minimum wage and promises of wealth and prosperity on political agendas that have no objective other than personal gratification because apparently America isn’t good enough unless it gives us what we want without responsibility or accountability.

Because we take for granted that our government won’t take your children and torture them because they criticized the government publicly. Because we don’t realize that having a job at all—even an underpaid one—is inherently better than millions around the globe who can’t even get to school without the prospect of being blown to bits in a conflict they probably don’t even understand.

There are good people in the world. Lots of them. And in one effort to somehow capture their attention in a world vying to destroy our sense of morality and obligation, I have this one message.

Wake up. Pay attention. Turn off your television. Take a step away from your Netflix and realize that this world could use a lot of help. Be educated. Research the conflict. Explore ways to contribute. But for goodness sake, don’t brush this aside like another episode on your favorite tv show or level on that video game that dramatizes death and murder as something to be excited about rather than fought against.

Syria is not an isolated event in the history of genocide and war. And as one political science major who devoted maybe too much time to the study of terrorism, I can say that I’m tired. Tired of trying to make a difference in an apathetic world of cultural conundrums and social licentiousness. 

So about those Syrian refugees.

For goodness sake, just let them come.