1) We are now asking whether it was someone's personal responsibility for drowning at sea. That is how subhuman refugees are to many people in the UK. Too many people talk about refugees, not enough people talk to them. They are mere objects, to be debated and then discarded.
2) It shouldn't matter, but it seems that some people - some newscasters - still need to understand just how much desperation it takes to put yourself in a boat to escape to a country where you will be safe. If they did they wouldn't come out with cruel questions like that.
3) My worry was once that refugees like my own family would come to the UK, quietly get on with it, not tell their stories, and not telling their stories would allow others to sanitise the refugee experience. But then I realised: your stories don't matter if you're not human.
4) I don't know how we fix this. All I know is that if the newscaster had parents who had escaped what mine had, then he would be utterly ashamed that the question about personal responsibility had ever left his mouth. I hope that he regrets asking that forever.
5) All these arguments that people fleeing their country should stay in the first European state they get to. We have no idea what prompted that Sudanese boy to get in that boat, but you can bet he did it for good reason. You can bet he saw and heard enough to risk his life.
6) Sadly not enough people in the UK care about the desperation it takes to flee the place where you were born. If they did care, if their contempt was not so aggressive, I might have spent more of my life telling those stories. But you cannot open hearts resolved to hate.
7) I have relatives who stayed in Uganda right up until the point when they feared actual extermination. Where they would go to work and to study and return to hiding, because if they were found where they slept then they would be dragged from their beds, assaulted, disappeared.
8) When you find yourself typing and deleting and retyping tweets because your mind is clouded with rage, when you find yourself furious at the finely-distilled cruelty of the country you grew up in, then you should probably leave the thread there, and so I will leave it there. /
