This week I signed up to help the Afghan refugees that are fleeing the horror of the Taliban and coming to the Triangle. I’m not exactly sure what I will be doing but I hope it will be helpful in some small way.
When the US (meaning us) abandoned the Kurds in Northern Syria, I was both angry and sad. Our country’s track record of using and then abandoning groups to help our strategic interest is written in our history. It’s amazing to me that as far as the US new cycle goes, the plight of the Kurds in northern Syria, sandwiched between Russian and government forces, was a brief blip. Yet, as we know if you follow news outside the US, there were men, women and children that died because of our departure.
I knew a man that was there in Syria trying to help. When I tried to donate money to him, paypal cancelled the transaction because apparently if you use the word “Syria” in a communication, our transactions are flagged and stopped. Not only did our government decide to abandon them, they made it difficult or impossible for ordinary people to help them.
Get Arthur Lawida’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Now, the same thing is happening in Afghanistan. I actually believe the right move is to end our engagement there and given the way we prosecuted the war and handled the withdrawal negotiations, I don’t think we could get a better outcome. Once again, we propped up a corrupt government that did not represent the collective interests of the people we were trying to help.
I believe it falls to us citizens to do what our own government cannot do. We have to come together to make sure the ideals that we have tried to embody as a country over the decades are manifested.
In my opinion, our political system is broken beyond repair. The measure of doing the “right thing” or the “decent thing” is no longer the metric for the actions that our politicians take. It’s simply getting reelected that concerns them most. And, it seems, the only way to get reelected is to be radical on either side because then, they get noticed.
What we need is a revolution of the decent people, at whatever level we can effect, and to stop being at the mercy of memes and lies and expediency at the cost of human values.
I hope I can do some good for these people fleeing for their lives and I hope you can too.
Here’s a link to the organization I applied to if you have interest. I believe they have chapters across the country. https://worldrelief.org/durham/get-involved/volunteer/
