There but for the will of god go I

Subject: There but for the "will of god" go I.

One of the problems of understanding anything is the gap we create in visualising ourselves faced with the circumstances of what we are considering.
Immigrants fleeing from a war zone can be viewed as a threat considering the numbers and the effect large numbers of immigrants from a particular area can have on the environment, your own, with the diverse foreign cultural baggage they bring.
Viewed as individuals it's different. Their scale becomes your scale, their problems are interpreted as similar to yours if, god forbid you were forced to flee.
We all see problems as a collective not an individual problem. Individuals can be helped and understood within our common humanity but when we see numbers we lose our ability to empathise.
I'm reading a book about Greece and its economic troubles. It's written by an American Greek who has studied the internecine conflict of tax avoidance on a countrywide scale and the conflicting claim of the need to pay for services and benefits which in Greece were very generous.
Yanis  Varoufakis has written a number of very readable books on the plight of Greece after its extravagance of entering the Euro and its subsequent bankruptcy when the loans were called in. His books depict a merciless Bundesbank evincing harsh, no nonsense treatment to a state on its uppers. In fact it was this picture which did as much for me to vote to leave the EU when the referendum came around, not wishing to be part of an organisation led by people with such a harsh, parsimonious values.
Anyway this book I am now reading by James Angeles sets out much of the other side of the story, of how Greek society had grown Used to being feather bedded, in part because it knew that the fat cats in Greek society avoided any kind of responsibility towards the state as an institution.
To add a further burden on their shoulders Greece is seen as a point of entry from Africa and the Middle East through Turkey or the perilous crossing over the Mediterranean Sea
His descriptions of the hopelessness of people caught in a bureaucratic nightmare, treated as subhuman, beaten and pilfered at every turn. It is only when one sees these people as individuals, mothers with children, children on their own does one slowly begin to understand.  Swapping places with the person who has cast themselves out from their tribal security, a society which itself had become insecure, why else leave, and face such  horror, it is only then can one find empathy.
Hope lives eternal they say and as these displaced baggages of unwanted flesh and bone, scour  the landscape  for a place to sleep, huger a constant companion, living in a maze of languages and bureaucratic hostility, we would do well to recognise the fact, there but for the "will of god" go I.