What's maddening to me is

if a family of refugees turned up on ong's doorstep and spoke English and could tell him their story and ask for some minimal hospitality for the night - I have a feeling ong wouldn't just slam the door in their face.

I have a feeling ong would feel compelled to extend compassion. Maybe offer some food or a blanket or just something.
Something.


And I suspect all the rhetoric about denying compassion to people is a byproduct of physical and emotional distance from those people.


After all... No one wants to see themselves as inhospitable to a person who needs a helping hand.
I don't think ong wants to live in a world where people don't help each other, even if they're strangers to each other.

It's just easy to separate individual human decisions into an amorphous glob of "migrants" or "refugees."


IDK. I'm pretty sure we're all decent folks, here.
That we can talk some smack, but at the end of the day, this is an internet conversation.
That despite certain hard line views, if we were confronted face to face with a starving family on the run from a war or a genocide that we'd at least sympathize with their simple need for someone in this fucked up world to not treat them like animals.