I am not shocked

Recently I was at a hotel being used to accommodate people seeking asylum. As people arrived and left they said a number which was duly noted down on a list. I presume the justification was some kind of fire register.

It made me deeply uncomfortable. 

Perhaps it was because it was shortly after Holocaust Memorial Day where images of individuals with numbers tattooed on their bodies were much in evidence, or perhaps simply because I know these people as individuals with names and stories; I found it extremely troubling ... 

And yet I wasn't shocked.

I think I have lost the ability to be shocked by anything at all in relation to the hostile environment.

I don't think that means I have become hardened by my exposure to these realities, or desensitised to the suffering ... on the contrary I continue to experience deep emotions in relation to what I see my friends experience on a daily basis.

I am often frustrated, angry, outraged. At times I feel a deep sense of guilt and shame that these things are perpetrated in my name. I have been reduced to tears, or held them back out of respect for those living with these realities.

But shock implies something unexpected and sadly, though I wish it were not so, it seems there is nothing that surprises me about the way we as a country (and the west more widely) respond to the desperate people who turn to us seeking sanctuary.

While I was reflecting on this I saw a tweet by UNHCR expressing that they were shocked and saddened about the deaths of a group of asylum seekers in Europe's borders. Perhaps they were. Perhaps it was just a turn of phrase. 

I wish I had been shocked. Just as I wish I had been shocked when the bodies of 21 people were fished out of the English channel. 

And it's not just about the stories that make the headlines, I also wish I was shocked by all the little individual stories of suffering which are never going to make the news but which impact on the lives of those I care about every single day. 

I wish I was shocked about the person in a wheelchair who has no step-free access to their accommodation. I wish I was shocked that there are people who have been stuck in inadequate "contingency accommodation", unable to so much as cook a meal for themselves, for more than a year. I wish I had been shocked when a mum and new born arrived in their accommodation to find the heating was broken. I wish I was shocked when people are counting in years rather than months how long they are waiting to be interviewed by the Home Office, let alone receive a decision on their claim. I wish I was shocked when people are ripped away from their communities to be taken to accommodation many miles away in other parts of the country with no thought to the impact on their wellbeing. The list goes on.

I wish I was shocked by those individual human beings who are finding themselves identified by a number. 

But there is something else which used to take me by surprise and no longer does, but which I am determined always to celebrate and never to take for granted ...

I am also no longer shocked by the hope and resilience, by the generosity and open-heartedness, and by the capacity for laughter and joy I see in the midst of all this too.