The Refugee Problem

The episode illustrates that when the normal day-to-day activity of society disintegrates, the collapse of civilization is only a few paces behind. We all walk on the edge of the abyss.
-Saudi Gazette

So.

Let's talk about refugees.

In the past couple of days, there has understandably been a lot of attention focused on that delightfully apocalyptic situation on the Gulf coast - the disaster itself, the equally disasterous response, the fact of New Orleans being considered "completely destroyed", the growing US media revolt in its wake, the poorly-chosen names for some relief operations, and of course some individual stories. I'm not going to actually discuss these tonight, though; other people have done so better and at more length.

What I'm here to discuss tonight is a little issue of word choice which really isn't about word choice at all. An example of some of the nasty little memes that hover in the back of most peoples' minds, just waiting for a chance to spring forth and expose our inner dumbasses.

So. Refugees.

In the past few days, I've seen a lot of howls of outrage springing up about the refugee situation in the Gulf. Why, you ask? Well, it settles down to the fact that the word refugee is being used at all. It's incorrect; it's misleading; it's demeaning; whatever. People think the term is either wrong or Wrong, and are railing against anyone else who refers to the one point five million refugees in the United States using those three syllables.

This originally struck me as merely stupid, out of the "well, duh" value of the whole thing, but it's transformed into something which actually offends me in the last day or two. The specific complaints about the term tend to wander off in several different directions, depending on politics and various other considerations.

Some people claim that the word is intrinsically dehumanizing and is hindering willingness to help those in need by giving them a stigmatized status they don't deserve.

Others claim that it's pumping up the status of people who should have been naturally selected, giving them prestige and sympathy they don't deserve.

Yet others are drawing the race card, saying that the refugees are being called such because they're mostly poor blacks (ignoring the fact that the survivors of Hurricane Andrew, off in other demographics, recieved the same descriptor).

Others still are claiming that using the term damages America's prestige in the world by implying that the United States can even have such things as refugees.

Now, see, none of these objections are accurate or terribly worthwhile. In fact, I take it a step further: I question whether more than one of these objections exists. The exception? The fourth one, the We Can't Have Refugees objection.

I've been in and around a lot of politically-charged forums, discussions, and so on over the past several years. The word refugee pops up a lot, Earth being a jackass of a world whose inhabitants and circumstances are wont to produce a few million occasionally. And, well, in the past week it's gone and done so again.

A major metropolitan area - and that's not even including the small towns and cities strewn across the rest of the affected area - has not simply been damaged, but destroyed. One hundred billion dollars' damage so far. Months of uninhabitability. Years to decades of reconstruction if it even happens. Thousands killed, thousands injured, and one point five million people - half a percent of the American population! - made homeless and strewn to the four winds and most of the continental United States, generally with naught but their lives and a few meagre possessions.

Generally speaking, if this happened to a population anywhere else in the world, we (and the people Howling in Outrage right now) would call them "refugees" without a second thought. There's a reason for that, and it's a simple reason: they are refugees.

"Anywhere else in the world." That's the key here.

The main reason a lot of people are complaining about the word "refugee" isn't because it's dehumanizing, or too generous, or a matter of colour, or whatever. It's because they believe Americans can't be refugees, because that's a term which applies to "other people" instead.

There. Someone said it, and I'm glad it was me.

In the past week, a giant gaping hole has been torn in another of the It Can't Happen Here bubbles which shields most North American society (I'm including my own Canada here). An area the size of Great Britain was plunged into the 1800s; a disaster struck so forcefully that the government of the mightiest civilization ever to have existed is struggling to cope; a major city was depopulated, its remnants reduced to an odd melange of martial law and anarchistic chaos.

Guess what, people? It Happened Here.

I understand that there is going to be a sense of shock, coupled with denial and anger, at the mere suggestion that part of the United States can find itself plunged into Third World conditions at all, much less over any meaningful length of time. This is the country which life-as-usualled in NYC only a couple of days after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, after all. It's a country where trailer parks being hurled into the sky has become a running gag, secure in the knowledge that the victims will be back on their feet before the twister hits the county border. It's a country whose previous instances of large American communities getting destroyed lie not quite beyond living memory (and, frankly, weren't nearly as severe as this). It's "not supposed" to be a city in which society manages to collapse in major metropolitan areas.

However, the reaction over the term refugee sounds to me like a worse aspect of this denial. Even though there's a growing acceptance that It can, in fact, Happen, people are still hiding from the human aspect. All of the objections in this whole "refugee" fiasco - and I do mean all of them, even the more eloquently-done, apolitical-sounding ones - still carry that overtone I mentioned above. Whether people know it or not, they are still claiming that refugees aren't something which can happen to Americans, but rather only to other people. Presumably lesser people, even.

Well, guess what, guys. Right now, there are a whole lot of bona-fide refugees in the United States. No amount of avoiding the term, dismissing it as demeaning, or euphemizing it by calling them Internallydisplaced-Americans is going to change that fact.

The best thing to do instead would be to suck up and accept the fact that the term applies. In other words, cope. Americans have just recieved a very harsh demonstration that their country and its people, frankly, aren't special in any fundamental metaphysical way compared to the rest of the world. Those of us in developed nations are all, at all times, only a few meals and some lighting away from chaos.

Rather than affect some more outrage at the reminder, perhaps people should see if they can draw any lessons from the fact.

Posted by zibblsnrt at September 5, 2005 06:38 PM

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