Mid East meets West
Unless you live under a rock you'll know that the Mid East is currently in turmoil. Really, really deep doo-doo, actually. It's their normal state of affairs. Literally millions of refugees have fled the wars in Syria and Iraq, and now are trying to escape the barbarism of ISIS, too. Many hundreds of thousands have made their way to Europe, looking for a better, or at least safer, life.
According to EU rules, open borders theoretically allow those in any EU country to move freely around and into any other EU country. This is now being challenged, and strained. It's really a sad situation. All these migrants want is to not be shot at, to work, to provide food for their families and a roof over their heads. It's something we can all sympathize with.
Here's the problem: Germans, possibly because of their lingering national guilt due to their dark WWII-years, have been surprisingly accommodating to these refugees, while many other countries have not been. Germany expects 900,000 to arrive just this year. (To put this into context, it would be like 3,000,000 refugees arriving in the US in just one year.) That's quite a social burden to take on. Most of the rest of Europe can't or won't, and it's threatening the cohesion of Europe, such as it is. Yet the migrants keep coming.
Things are getting more tense and desperate by the day, which historically will lead to an eventual breaking point. And every terrorist attack, such as the French train shooting a few weeks ago, strengthens the case of the anti-immigrant factions who see in every refugee a latent terrorist.
So when is this breaking point going to be reached, and when it happens, what form will it take? Beats me. All I know is that the Europeans are being re-active, and not pro-active. They fell behind the curve early and will probably never make up the lost ground....a situation that anarchists dream of.
Remember reading of those days when having big 'ol oceans around us kept us isolated from all those pesky foreign problems? No more. We're no longer immune from the wars in the Mid East, the stock market crash in China, or pollution originating anywhere in the world. All those problems will find us, too, probably sooner rather than later.
In retrospect, do you think maybe we should have left Iraq, and Libya, and Syria, and all the rest of that blighted region alone? They were in a bad situation for sure, but are things any better today after all our meddling? We were told the goal was to get the bad guys over there before they could get to us here, but I fear the opposite....we've only accelerated the process.
Yes, I'm a political science nerd. It's gonna be interesting (for me at least) to see how all this eventually shakes out. Keep your powder dry.
S
