Hani, 37, looks desperately at me in a refugee camp in Greece and says,
You know what the most difficult part of this experience is? Yes, we [refugees] are primarily a group of people who literally traversed earth with our feet to secure a better future for our children.. only to find that we cannot legally get jobs and our children will not get an education. Yes, we are physically sick and mentally devastated. Yes, we go to sleep every night - knowing our families are either dead or not with us -- but with no knowledge of what's in store for us tomorrow when we wake up. But the worst part of all of this? No one in the world seems to care.
Hani escaped Aleppo, Syria several months ago to arrive in a refugee camp on the border of Greece-Macedonia. Today, his family remains in eastern Aleppo with no access to food and water. This is because, as our media chose to incessantly highlight Trump's vitriolic speech and ignore world affairs, Aleppo became besieged, leaving no way for Syrians to leave and obliterating the movement of supplies and humanitarian personnel. Today, 20 doctors remain in Aleppo for 300,000-400,000 people. Today, they are trapped under perpetual and indiscriminate bombing by Russian forces, leaving undernourished, traumatized children and frail adults to care for themselves. Today, amidst silence from the rest of us, they have taken matters into their own hands. Across Aleppo, people are burning rubber tires to obscure targets and protect themselves. Don't get me wrong: doing everything we can to ensure Trump never becomes our President is an incredibly important task, but let us not focus solely on him and neglect the grave mass injustices happening across the world. The single worst humanitarian crisis of our time is exacerbating every day, and our silence means we are complicit in the atrocities. Our decision to ignore the news and remain comfortable leading our lives means we are intentionally allowing for 300,000 people to starve to death. Our decision to turn a blind eye means we are denying people their humanity every day -- it means we are intentionally allowing for them to die simply because they are not us.
There are steps we can take to stop this. We can raise awareness among social media and urge others to do the same. We can place pressure on our government to step up and ensure this atrocity stops immediately by calling the White House, Secretary Kerry, senators, and representatives. We can place pressure on our media outlets to cover relevant worldly news. We can ensure they understand that we will not be complicit in the denial of others' humanity.
When our children ask us what we did to help alleviate the worst crisis of our time, let us not be quiet in shame. Let us step up and make sure they understand we did everything we could together to stop it. And we succeeded.