Once again, the Mediterranean has claimed the lives of 700, yes SEVEN HUNDRED, immigrants as they attempted to reach Europe with dreams of a better chance for their future.

This is such a complex issue to address, but at the base of it all, there are people dying, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, friends. People. Human beings like you and me who walk this earth, this one planet, but a tiny, tiny, tiny infinitesimal speck in the universe. Seriously, this is us:

How can it be that we can’t rise above all these divisions and work towards a common good? Simplistic? Yes. Important? Totally.

Enough with the rhetoric, it’s time for action. What that action is, remains to be seen. But for goodness sake, Europe, do something about it.

I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics. This is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding.
If I may be allowed to express myself paradoxically, I should say that the truest society, the authentic human community, is extra-social — a wider, deeper society, that which is revealed by our common anxieties, our desires, our secret nostalgias. The whole history of the world has been governed by nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly. No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

Eugen Ionescu

Let’s focus on the dreams, let’s focus on the fears, surely, they’re universal. It’s time to put humanity back where it belongs in the equation – dead centre.

Let’s hope that Martin Schulz can spur words into action, let’s hope that the indignation and horror being expressed by the powers-that-be, by NGOs, by the person in the street now move firmly beyond the rhetoric, because words alone will do nothing to stem this tragedy. Rather, in my books, they are actually worse, a means to assuage our ‘guilt’ while doing nothing about it.