Ben Cooper: "Why We Treat Harry Potter Better Than Syrian Refugees"

Why we Treat Harry Potter better than Syrian Refugees.

Ben Cooper

I always empathized with the “teenager overthrows evil regime stories” as a kid: I was Eragon, Peter and Harry fighting Galbatorix, the White Witch and Voldemort. I still love these stories but over time, my favorite story became Artemis Fowl, a story about how a child prodigy went from evil to quintessential good. He exerted enormous influence on the world around him his incredible mind, a role I saw myself in (I wasn’t very strong as a kid :P).

Around the same time as I decided Artemis Fowl was my favorite book (yes, I made an “official” decision), I started learning about the lovely world of politics My world was one of logic and evidence but politics came and flipped this world around,. While we hadn’t quite hit the “Trumpian” bar, I still heard stuff like the “legitimate” rape comment from Missouri's Senate candidate Todd Akins.

This frustrated me.

I was frustrated that I no longer lived in my (as I now understand it, sheltered) consistent world. I was frustrated that there wasn’t anybody stopping all of it (indeed, Todd Akin still somehow legitimately got 39.2% of the vote in his Missouri senatorial election).

I didn’t react to that very well, embracing super liberal Facebook pages, spamming my friends news feeds and arguing with my conservative friends for hours on end. It was a way to retake control over the insanity that had suddenly invaded my life.

Around this time in my life, I kind of dropped fiction. I stopped reading it and transitioned towards nonfiction. I abandoned the world of Alagaësia and Narnia and returned to my Muggle-y existence of science minus the fiction.

I also joined the forensics community around this time. I started learning more and more about how the world works and how it functioned. As a kid, I learned about the US system and all its supposed perfections. The Civil War was about states’ rights, France wasn’t really the reason for us winning the Revolution and the Vietnam War was a win for the United States. I started questioning all of these assumptions and learned a lot about the United States and how it functioned. This boiled into anger that continued for another two years.

This spilled over at a recent speech tournament. I was marked down because of anger because I was talking about Syrian refugees, a topic I care a ton about. The US response to it (i.e. rampant Islamophobia) has been utterly shameful with a few rare bright spots.

It’s times like this I’m reminded of what fiction can do. I can’t right now (because it’s the end of the semester) but I’ve felt the urge to escape to fiction where no one bans Syrian refugees and everyone who does gets eaten by a dragon. I’ve also steadily realized why it was silly of me to avoid fiction for so long. It might not hold (at least not unambiguously) strong life lessons like my nonfiction books but it lets me escape to another world to learn and grow.

Empathy is intrinsically related to our ability to solve problems (we have to empathize with the symptoms of a problem to understand it which is needed to solve it). It also happens to be sorely missing from our current Syrian refugee debate. Syria is currently a hellhole yet Americans are overwhelmingly against settling refugees here. This profound lack of empathy for what these people have gone through has given way to rampant Islamophobia.

And here’s where fiction can help out.

Through fiction, we learn to empathize with our fictional characters. The world’s most powerful GPU, the human brain, create the crises that our protagonists go through. This directly applies to situations like the Syrian refugees: we’ve all felt the pain that Harry did when losing Hedwig. Then when we see the civil war that these refugees have gone through, this developed sense of empathy guides us to do the right thing to build a better world.

That better world is one where we understand the struggles others have faced because of our empathy. That better world is one where we understand other people’s approach to problems because of our empathy. That better world is one where we develop systems that value people because of our empathy.

And then, maybe, a few of these people can put to paper their own piece of fiction, much like the fiction that developed them because of their empathy.