I watched the video “Europe of Die: People Smuggling in Sicily” on VICE. One of the interviewees, a former people trafficker, said this about his job “It is a bad thing, because you are dealing with people, living souls.” He goes on to express how even after smugglers see people dying, they can’t give it up, nor do they want to because of how profitable it is. The EU has declared war on human trafficking in Libya – the targets are not the migrants, the targets are those making money on their lives and their deaths. But then on top of that, there is this issue of “land smuggling,” where new migrants are exploited and pay land smugglers to help them get to northern Europe in order to escape the EU’s Dublin Regulation. For example, the land smugglers take advantage of new migrants and make them pay upwards of $200 for a $38 bus ticket because the new migrants don’t know any better. This concept in itself is mind-boggling to me, especially when so many of these smugglers are within the migrant community themselves. It’s appalling to think about the lack of humanity and community that is an inevitable byproduct of the migrant crisis. What happened to things like communitas? Our ability as social beings to empathize and sympathize? Where has humanity taken us if people are being exploited by those within their very community?

After reading “Catastrophes” by Cristiana Giordano, my question is – what is the balance between ordinary and extraordinary? While I completely understand the point the author is trying to make, it also makes me question why we view certain events as catastrophes to begin with and what affect that has. By viewing events through a catastrophic lens, I believe that it brings the event to the forefront of our minds and makes us want to do something about it – something I’ll term, “the extraordinary effect.” Unfortunately, ordinariness fosters complacency and complacency fosters inaction. The rhetoric behind viewing something as a catastrophe inevitably downplays its prevalence and ubiquity – that is the point Giordano is arguing. However, I would like to question whether we would even be making attempts to “resolve” or at least focus on the migrant and refugee crisis if it wasn’t within the framework of a catastrophe and if it didn’t have “the extraordinary effect.”