...There are two kinds of refugees or immigrants that people are talking about, the political ones and the economic ones. People who are political refugees have an obvious moral claim according to the UN and to all of the countries that subscribe to the UN charter on refugees. And so there’s a big incentive to try not to classify people as political refugees and instead call them “economic migrants” or “economic refugees” or whatever term you want to use. This justifies closed borders or closed-door policies; as if to say that these “economic refugees” are not fleeing for real reasons that we should take into account.
In my view, both of these stances are wrong. Political refugees, we do owe a lot to them, and we should have a much larger category of political refugees. But even if we say these people are economic migrants, the question is: Why are they economic migrants or refugees? And I think the justification for closing borders and doors is based on this idea that we don’t owe people who are so-called “economic refugees” anything. It’s their countries that are at fault. But, if we take a more global and historic view of things, in many cases people have become refugees economically or politically because the West — often the United States — has gone and screwed with their countries directly in the past or in the present in ways that Western European or American citizens are not aware of, or are screwing them now through climate change, which is a direct result of Western lifestyles. So we need to understand how we are connected as human beings across borders, and of course the people who are living in more privileged countries are invested in not seeing that, and their governments are invested in not seeing that, and this is only a foreshadowing of what’s going to happen in the next few decades or century.
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Refugees and climate catastrophe, they’re linked phenomena. So that’s the
first step: expand the consciousness.Second step: What do we do? …The politicians should be doing something about it, and every citizen should be doing something about it. We need to be mobilized politically, no matter what. And the more we see that all these issues are connected, the more we see that the local actions we take could have a broader impact if they’re part of a larger agenda. The average citizen who just sees, “Oh my God, there’s a refugee crisis and a global climate crisis,” obviously feels he can’t do anything about it as an individual person. These issues are just too large. But, if you feel politically motivated, you start with the local and you connect that to the rest.
…Find the issue that matters to you and then make sure you understand how that issue resonates globally. That’s how all activism begins. If you start by saying, “I can’t stop the global problem,” of course you can’t. You have to start with the local problem and make sure you understand that these things are all connected together.
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Politics is not necessarily always about changing the minds of the people
you oppose or your enemies, because they’re not going to change their minds.
They have their own convictions, even though they’re wrong [Laughs],
and they’re going to do what they believe. So the only way to make political
change is to get them out of office! That’s just the reality of it.And so that’s why I do think that local actions matter. If you don’t support Macron, if you don’t support Trump, then you have to work from the bottom up, just as the Republicans have apparently been doing very well for the past 30 or 40 or 60 years — or for however long the conservative agenda has been plotted. The conservative agenda needed the billionaires but couldn’t have come about without the foot soldiers working in grassroots organizations. So those of us who aren’t billionaires have to get involved at the grassroots level. And that’s where you change minds. You change minds at the grassroots level and you affirm the beliefs of the people who share your convictions.
That’s why I think speaking up isn’t always a wasted effort, even if you’re speaking to people who share your convictions. Because we need to have that affirmation of what it is we believe in, to be able to continue hearing that message and to articulate it more effectively to ourselves and to others.
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the human capacity for greater love and empathy works in
parallel with the human capacity for destruction. So we may kill ourselves first before we get
to the point where we have a greater human community. Because there are nuclear
weapons and climate catastrophe — so any kind of optimism has to be layered
with great pessimism. I don’t know what the outcome is going to be. I know we
have the capacity to do it; I also know that we have the capacity to destroy
others and ourselves, and I don’t know which one is going to win.
