Love thy (white/Christian/American) neighbor

Toward the end of his masterful book World War Z, Max Brooks "interviews" a Cuban who describes a flood of refugees running to Cuba during the crisis, fleeing to an island refuge away from a mainland overrun with the undead. We hear a lot about refugees these days, but we never think that the refugees might be "like us." In the case of World War Z, they are us.

In the nightmare going on in the real Middle East currently, there is a massive flood of refugees, running to anywhere that might take them - Greece, Germany, Jordan, anywhere they can go to escape the hoard that has taken over their homeland. They are fleeing for their lives, most have left nearly everything they own, and many have lost loved ones along the way, as the video below by John Green describes at one point (video credit to the Vlogbrothers)

These are people like us, often with cell phones. Some have claimed that these phones proove that things aren't that horrible for the refugees, but most these phones are no longer on a network, since these refugees have had to spend whatever they had to try to get to safety (which often isn't so safe, as the iconic image of a drowned 3 year old child that brought the bulk of western attention to this crisis in the first place shows). They keep these phones charged, not for making calls, but to see the pictures they have of the loved ones they've either left behind or lost along the way. To them, these phones and photos are items from a previous life - one of comparative prosperity and peace, rather than chaos.

Once these people get smuggled out of their home country, they have a long, dangerous journey ahead of them, boarding rafts that are not seaworthy to reach lands that may or may not accept them. After all, they're not "like us"