Decency Happens
I wrote a post yesterday to the effect that we live in a world in which the oil companies are systematically destroying the environment, all the while using their enormous wealth to prevent the citizenry from passing laws that would protect itself against this aggression. On a planet as depraved as this, could anything be happening that indicates humankind still maintains some level of kindness and compassion?
Check out what Sweden just did for the Syrian refugees. All such people fleeing this area that is “generally marked by violence” are granted permanent residency, and are invited to bring the members of their families, who will be granted the same. To prevent them from being isolated when they arrive, they will receive free bus passes.
The Swedish girl in the photo seems to approve of what’s going on in front of her. Young lady, with this decision on the part of your country, the world sends its approval right back to you. My hat’s off to Sweden, and I’m sure all people of decency around the globe feel the same way.
Excerpted from one of the linked news articles – http://www.thelocal.se/20130903/50030
“The decision covers all asylum seekers from Syria who have been granted temporary residency in Sweden for humanitarian protection. They will now receive permanent residence permits, the Swedish Migration Board (Migrationsverket) announced on Tuesday…
“The decision means that the roughly 8,000 Syrians who have temporary residency in Sweden will now be able to stay in the country permanently.
“They will also have the right to bring their families to Sweden.
“While Malek Laesker, vice-chair of the Syrian Arabian Cultural Association of Sweden (Syrisk arabiska kulturföreningen i Sverige), welcomed the decision, he also warned it could create problems.
” ‘The fact that Sweden is the first country to open its arms is both positive and negative,’ he told the TT news agency, explaining that it may be a boon for the growing people-smuggling market.”
Nevertheless, I’d say this is really good news for 8.000 Syrians and their family members.
Yes despite many stark daily examples of how the so called advanced world seems to be indifferent to human and environmental suffering; we do see people rise up to the right and decent thing and share with new neighbors. We need more of this action. Decency Lives !
Yes, it lives, in a big way. We’re a magnificent species. Thanks for your uplifting comment.
Greed must be shackled, harnessed, and directed, before it will work for the greater good of nations.
Corporations have proven they hold no regard for life or ethics, and should be strictly regulated and prevented from exercising influence upon the People’s government through bribery in any form. They must also be barred from gouging the population for the crucial necessities of life. Let profit be made only on those things we can choose whether we consume or not.
These conclusions must not be dismissed as the result of sentimentality, or naïve idealism – they are the product of cold logic, supported by long and cruel history, and the increasing precariousness of our own present and recent experience.
In spite of our Republican and Democratic traditions, it is now said that there are really only two political parties – the Populist camp and the Corporate camp. Yet the path we must tread is that of vigilance and communication, and the bright horizon to which we again set our eyes must be the universal freedom and right for all to live in dignity and prosperity.
The direction of our societies must not be left to heartless greed, lest we sink again to the jungle we have only escaped through cooperation and sharing.
The prosperity and stability which we who live here in the U. S. often ascribe to the 1950’s, and the social consciousness to which we aspired as a nation in the 1960’s, can both be achieved – for all the people in the developing nations of the world, for ourselves, and for future generations.
The alternative is the perpetual indentured servitude of the entire human species to an elitist, autocratic, and monopolist collective whose sole endeavor is to blindly exploit and deplete the people and resources of our world in order to increase the opulence of a few.
Our choices are dignity or slavery, liberty or death. It has often been so, but our capacity for final destruction is now unparalleled in the history of our species. Many civilizations have perished through blind and cruel devotion to monumental waste. With the unprecedented ability to fling death across the globe in a fit of rage, if we fail now, ours may not merely be the next civilization to perish… we may be the very last.
Truth — Non-Violence — Cooperation — Direct Action – Perseverance
Craig,
You seem to be a bit behind the times in your praise for an idealized Sweden. The conservative government of Australia was the first to announce an that Australia acceptance of 12,000 Syrian refugees.
I’m not sure what oil companies have to do with the events in Syria, or why you would attempt to combine the two in a completely inappropriate juxtaposition.The Syrian crisis is almost completely created by Pres. Obama’s erratic policy decisions.
All industrialized societies, in fact all civilization, depends on an abundance of economically viable energy. Oil and coal, have been the key to massive human progress. Advanced Industrial societies have provide a vast expansion in human liberty, health. happiness, and security. Most medical advances, education, political freedom, racial equality, egalitarianism, has been the result of mass production, and expansion of corporate capital.
The world refugee crisis is created by the rapid expansion of mass media, TV, internet etc.
Not for the first time, millions of people (as many as 100 million) people have started to believe that they can get a better standard of living by emigration to targeted “rich’ nations”.
But it’s not as simple as it once was. There is now vast empty lands needing settlers, willing to suffer hardship to assimilate and build a new life as citizens of a new country. Today’s migrants want to have a better economic life in a safer environment, but retain the beliefs, culture etc of their previous domicile. These migrants, are not temporary refugees anxious to return to their home lands, but economic migrants.
The indigenous citizens of those nations who accept these refugees, especially those who arrive chaotically, must be expected to accept the economic and social burden of paying for infrastructure and services for a massive social problem that will last for decades.
The old (heavily romanticized) concept of a benign melting pot of new arrivals, contributing to a more diverse and vibrant culture, is a fiction.
The reality is far more brutal, and is not helped by well meant but impractical sentimentality. The US, Western Europe. Canada, Australia, etc couldn’t possibly accept or integrate an influx of 30, 40, 100 million refugee/migrants.
What about the poor of those nations ? Should they be further deprived of opportunities, to make way for migrants ? The old argument that migrants helped build the economic life of a nations by creating development, is obsolete. The Western Nations are already over populated, and the need for ” migrant labour ‘ has long since disappeared.
The images of Syrian refugees fleeing from terror is very sad, but it must also be put into context. The forces creating this mass exodus, are exceedingly ruthless and very fierce, but they are also numerically very small in comparison to the vast numbers of refugees.
The Kurdish forces offer sanctuary for the families of all those Syrians who wish to join the Kurdish armed forces to free the areas occupied by the oppressors of the refugees. So too does the Assad regime, which for all it’s fault’s, provided stability.
These Syrians should be seeking a way to reclaim their homes and lands, even if it means fighting a ferocious enemy. If the Revolutionary Americans had simply all “run away” at the sound of Paul Revere’s famous cry, the Stars and Strips would still have a Union Jack in the corner !
All civil wars are difficult to decipher, the politics and faction are never as simple as the protagonists proclaim. Mass migration, is just another option to civil conflict created by modern media, and adds another incentive to avoiding resolving civil conflicts conclusively.
The problem of economic migration from the third world, is too serious and complex to be resolved in simplistic, moralistic terms.