Cascade Courier - Your trusted local news source since 1910

Since the advent of 24 hour per day, 365 days per year news cycle we’ve become accustomed to being inundated with so much news that we easily ignore news of great importance to someone else but doesn’t affect us directly.

Sometimes there are problems we hear about but ignore even though the folks who know best try to alert us that it is going to get so big that it impacts everyone. Those are the problems we need to pay attention to sooner rather than later.

There are 10 million refugees in the world. Some are caused by nationalistic megalomaniacs like Putin but a huge percentage is caused by lower level warfare and civil unrest created by climate change. What is startling is, it is estimated that by 2050, there will be over one billion refugees.

Rising sea levels, food scarcity, intolerable heat will drive people from their homes. Some of those people will not be strangers from Pakistan or some place we can generally ignore, they will be our own citizens who can no longer live where they and their families have called home. Any low-lying area near oceans are highly vulnerable. Areas of Florida and Louisiana are already experiencing dislocation.

If there’s one phrase I absolutely despise it’s, “Well, I would never…”. The bedrock truth is there are things we would never do given the circumstances in which we comfortably live. It’s easy to say we would never leave our homes and take our families on a dangerous trip to an uncertain destination in hope of improving life when we don’t have to make such a decision.

Folks from Ukraine, Honduras, Guatemala, Myanmar, Sudan, Syria, wouldn’t leave their homes either if they weren’t forced to by circumstance. People don’t leave everything they know and love unless they have no choice. Former doctors, lawyers, engineers today do menial work here so they and their families are safer.

Changing climate means more and more people will face another year of failed crops who take whatever they can and start walking toward hope. The Bible tells us over and over and over to care for the stranger in our midst, to treat refugees as we treat each other.

I don’t know the answer, it’s too big for any one person, but I do know what will not work. Scattered all around the world are monuments to fortress mentality. Being terrified of foreign invaders has led people to build castles to protect themselves from the “others”. It has never worked.

When someone’s life and the lives of their loved ones are endangered, life will find a way. No castle, no fortress mentality will stop those determined to live.

If we would like to cut down on the number of refugees in our world we have to do everything we can to stop wars, to end oppression of the poor and minorities, to mitigate the effects of climate change. It is the great challenge of our time and that of generations to come.