Afraid even of our own shadow

Subject: Afraid even of our own shadow

Is it the essence of who we are to feel compassion for other people.
Most people would say yes if they came from the relatively prosperous West with its abundant mental space to reflect on the position of others vis a vis ourselves. But what happens in that emotional equation if our actions begin to threaten our own cosy existence. Swopping some of our cosy advantage might be acceptable so long as the threat to our way of life is not too acute and we can see some sort of gradualism, a time frame for us to promote new concepts and rational into our world of assumed surety.
Of course the world is in flux, it always has been since the times of Genghis Khan and before, a world of conquest and challenge, of change and the adoption of the new.

A friend wrote yesterday that with our immigrant problems the African diaspora were only reversing a trend where hundreds of years of colonisation, which has received such a bad press for the last twenty years, was now being thrown in our faces with the Africans colonisation of Europe.
For the young idealists who man the rescue ships, plucking people out of the sea there's  is more than just an humanitarian act it's an act of restoration. Resorting the underlying ethical rights of people to act in their own best interest.
As we close the ports and erecting walls to protect ourselves from the known and the unknown are we not also practising that essential trait of mankind to assert our right to preservation, what we see as our own best interest. Has the lifestyle and the economic advantage we have created through force of arms over the centuries not given us a self serving right to hang onto what we have. Or do we allow the 'brotherhood of man' an ill defined concept at the best of times, to trump our hubris. Do we turn to religious definitions or social definitions to map out our future or do we erected a stockade with sentries peering out into the night, afraid even of our own shadow.