Empathy is defiance.

Rwanda

The cusp of summer is here. But, normal is never coming back to fetch us and say the good times can begin again. Covid still lingers in our society and our lives like a predator we can not defeat. There is a despairing predictability to this age. After two years of the pandemic, our leaders learned nothing from it but how to better deny the facts, our history and our humanity.

I am disgusted but not surprised that Tony Blair was knighted for chivalry in service to the Crown at the moment when Britain’s Home Office prepared lists of refugee applicants for deportation to concentration camps in Rwanda.

There has been much opposition to Blair's ennoblement. And, there has been enormous outrage over Britain's debasement in civilisation's eye from deporting refugee claimants to concentration camps abroad. But even with the millions outraged by this, it still feels like we must suspend our optimism that humanity will come out intact from our profit for the 1% above all else mantra.

Yet to surrender to the inevitability of evil holding sway in our society is not the answer. We can not give up our fight for the vulnerable, for the marginalised, for those made refugees by wars waged with our guns and bombs. Our simple acts of kindness, empathy or outrage may not save humanity, but it keeps us human while civilisation burns.

In the 1940s, my grandmother understood this. She was left-wing but no hero because the heroes to humanity died brutal deaths in Hitler's Germany. However, on occasions, my grandmother did things which were not safe. She even tried in a small way to feed Russian slave labourers encountered on her way home from work in a hotel kitchen. My grandmother knew they were starving and as good as dead. Yet, she proved that empathy for strangers, even during wartime is a strong emotion. So, when their Nazi guards were not looking, my grandmother tossed food over a barbwire enclosure to them that she had nicked from her employer. I doubt that it saved anyone from starving. But perhaps it gave some anonymous prisoners hope to chew on until their liberation.

Empathetic defiance was the ethos behind the creation of Harry's Last Stand. It did not die with my dad but continued through the work he left behind and my efforts to ensure that it was remembered.

It's why I found myself in February 2019, on a ferry from Dover to Calais. I was retracing the steps I had taken with my dad in years previous to make refugees welcome. On that ferry, I looked out from the observation window onto the vast nothingness of the water empty of land. Seeing it you realise its supreme desperation that drives refugees to come to Britain in rubber dinghies. It’s too lonely out there, too dangerous too enormous to make this trip without knowing it is your last hope to find sanctuary and have a chance to put down roots in a society where death comes from natural causes rather than a bullet.

It was unnaturally warm and sunny that February. For the person, I was visiting clear skies and warm weather felt more to them like a cruel joke because they were detained in an immigration detention centre awaiting deportation to Italy.

At the entrance to the immigration detention centre, located near a shopping mall on the outskirts of Calais, a guard checked my passport, and then his clipboard to see if my name was on the approved list of visitors. The guard let me pass through the gates, and then inside, I was physically searched. Afterwards, I was ushered into the detention centre's basement where a meeting room was located. In there was a 23-year-old man from a sub-Saharan country. He greeted me like an old friend even though we had never met before. I handed over some cigarettes that a refugee organisation had purchased for him. The young man then told me his story about how he ended up detained by French immigration authorities.

"I walked all the way from my prison in Africa to this prison in France." The previous year he journeyed from his home country to Libya because he was young, his life was shit, and his country’s govt corrupt. In Libya, he was arrested for illegal entry because the EU pays a bounty to that country’s kleptocratic rulers for every refugee they catch and detain to prevent their arrival on European shores. In a concentration camp in Libya, he was raped by his guards, beaten by his guards, and starved by his guards. The young man somehow managed to escape his captors and was able to find passage on a raft to Lampedusa. It was in Italy; where he first learned that European hospitality for black refugees is racism and physical violence. “Dogs are treated better than refugees like me."

With other refugees from Africa; he upped sticks and walked to France because he hoped to get to England, where a family member of his lived legally. Life had other plans for him because before he could make his journey to English shores on a raft, French police raided an encampment in the woods outside Dunkirk, where he and other refugees subsisted on the kindness of strangers. Perhaps, the young man pissed off the police, or they needed to fulfil their quota of "illegals,." But he was arrested on the spot and put before an immigration judge who ordered the man deported back to Italy, the first EU country he arrived at during his odyssey for refugee status.

After this young man finished his story, a guard who stood watch outside our interview room told me our time was up. I wished him luck, and we hugged. As I left, a wave of sorrow came over me. I knew he was not ever going to make it to England. He was never going to be the one; who near the end of a long life, bored his grandchildren after Sunday dinners in his suburban house with stories about the dangerous crossings he made long ago to find sanctuary, peace and prosperity in a new land. His story and the hundreds of other stories I've been told while breaking bread with is refugees is why I continue being defiantly empathetic. I don't want myself or others to forget why we are human is to nurture each other on our path through life.