Dreams of Peace

“I was in school and we heard the bomb sirens,” he told me. “I was young, like everyone else in the classroom but the teacher, and we huddled under desks and held our heads, as the deafening sound of warplanes and bombs filled the air around us.” My grandfather lived in England during the Second World War.

After the sirens stopped and the air cleared, teachers went out to see what had happened. The all-girls school across the street had been hit. They needed all the help they could get, or so the teachers thought. Students were told to get up, and go across the street to help. My grandfather and every other eight-year-old boy and girl in his class trekked out of the classroom and into the rubble of their sister school, a desolate scene.

They picked up bits of concrete and called out hoping to hear survivors’ cries for help. “I’d reach out to grab a hand, and pull a severed arm, or lift up a torso, no head or limbs, when moving rubble. There were severed heads. These were girls who were younger than me, some of them my neighbors. After a short time we realized everyone was dead. Our teachers sent us home.”

The horrors of war did not end with World War II. Just last year, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated that over 2,800 children, and 1,800 women, were killed in Syria’s civil war. In Iraq, the number of civilians killed reached at least 6,878. Between March 2015 and September 2016, an average of 13 civilians were killed in Yemen per day by airstrikes, totaling 10,000. Millions more have fled or attempted to flee violence, mostly women and children seeking nothing more than to live free of the fear that their daughters and sons will be killed before the next day comes.

Refugees risk everything, including their lives, to seek a better future for themselves and their children. Those who attempt to flee are seen as traitors, sometimes by multiple factions—as one report noted about Syrian refugees, “Regardless of who wins the war in Syria, these individuals will never be trusted or able to return safely to Syria.”

Thousands of refugees look to the West with hope that finding a home in Europe or halfway around the world will allow their children to live in peace. They have witnessed scenes like those my grandfather saw over 70 years ago in England. While they can’t wipe away memories, they want to be sure their children will survive to the next day, and never have to see such horrors again.

The administration’s latest executive action is a rejection of human decency. It is an assertion that some people’s lives are more valuable than others’ because of their place of birth and religion—which any moral person should disavow. Discriminating on the basis of religion has no place in our democracy. Violence does not impact Christians differently than Muslims or Jews; a father or mother’s pain of losing a child knows no religion.

Trump’s executive order also threatens the United States, making it easier for terrorists to paint the U.S. as a hostile enemy, and could unravel the global system that has enabled refugees to find safety since 1951, a system that depends on countries sharing the responsibility of admitting asylum seekers. The court stay of Trump’s executive order is a good step but the order has not been revoked in full. This administration poses a profound threat to human rights. We must all guard vigilantly against its affronts to human dignity.

I stand with refugees and against Trump’s order because no child deserves to suffer or die in a war he or she is caught in just because of where they were born. All people deserve the chance to live lives free of the fear that a bomb might hit their home or school on any given day. Those who are caught in violence today flee at their own peril, simply dreaming of a better life. It is our duty to do our best to give them a chance at life, and stand against any policy or action which threatens to deprive them of that most basic human opportunity—to live a full life in peace.