Its a small world! Get used to it people!

I was sitting with a bunch of blokes having morning tea and watching the news in one of my chaplaincies the other day. There was a report about the boat people whose boat got smashed to pieces on Christmas Island. There were quite a number of deaths. Some Australian politician got away with saying something like, "Well that's a bunch of Asians who won't trouble us anyway!" There was a general murmur of approval, with one guy saying, "Australians get away with saying what the rest of us think... Bloody Asians should stay in their own country!" I muttered something like, "they are still people and its sad!", but being a coward kept my head down.

I got to stewing on this as I ran on Sunday. Someone had scrawled, "Open boarders!" on the walls of a wharf storage shed and I run so slow I am able to read it. We have contact through our Space2B with a whole lot of immigrants who are here essentially because they want a better life for their kids. (Which one of us doesn't want that? Isn't it a sign of a caring and loving parent who goes to great lengths to bring that about? ) I also read in the paper the other day about big numbers of children of professional couples, where the parents have two different nationalities, and they are living in a country of neither one's birth. It seems that these children often cannot have legal citizenship of any country. They simply do not qualify.

Now I know that the economy is tight. I know that there are difficulties with new people in a country. But this world is getting VERY small. People are moving from country to country often. People are intermarrying. Cultures are mixing. Every country is getting more and more cosmopolitan. The attitudes that build walls, that exclude, that put down another race no longer belong in the world we live in today! They increase the tension, expand the problems and lead toward more destructive outcomes. There are issues involved in freeing up borders but they need to be tackled from the starting point of recognising that ultimately we are citizens of the one planet! The attitude displayed by the Australian politician and my friends watching the news with me are out of date, irrelevant and ought to be discarded!

A couple of Utube adverts remind us of this small world;

... we are under one sun.

and..
where do the children play

I read something the other day that reported one of the early astronauts commenting that from space looking at the earth, there were no obvious borders!

Did you know that my very best friends here and overseas are Australians!... even!