The refugee crisis is playing out, in large part, far from the US, and given the distance it’s easy for the situation to become somewhat of an abstraction to us. Through media coverage, we understand the numbers of people moving, the dangerous and often tragic conditions of their travel, the pressure on European governments (and our own) to look for a solution, the security questions raised and debated (especially now following the Paris attacks). One small point that stood out to me in the talk was that one (or maybe more, I can’t remember) of the volunteers in Hungary that Prof. Case had spoken to felt a similar kind of abstraction. Despite having worked many long days handing out food, water, and other necessities to passing migrants – a face-to-face interaction that you might expect to concretize their understanding of the migrants and their situation – they still felt as though the migrants were kind of anonymous individuals just passing through. Part of the reason for this feeling was that they were so busy preparing and distributing the meals that they really didn’t spend any considerable time with the migrants (and even if they had, language barriers likely could have prevented them from communicating meaningfully with them). So even to those providing assistance along the migrants’ path, the migrants themselves could remain a kind of abstraction, or somehow removed. I think this is troubling. Distance from a problem only makes it easier to choose inaction in response. Maybe there is potential for media coverage of migrants’ stories to help bridge that gap.