One of the most devastating images of the 21st Century will be the lifeless body of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on a beach in Turkey in September 2015.  His mother and his five-year-old brother also drowned, dying to reach the safety and security of Europe.  Nearly 4000 people lost their lives that year in Europe alone. More the year after. All trying to reach a place where they could live, work and thrive.

It’s a terrible irony that your gender, your country of birth, your precise economic situation, and your education determines whether you’re a winner or a loser. It really is a matter of life and death. This isn’t some form of natural selection.  In fact, today it seems that the more impoverished you are, the more bountiful the land you live in is likely to be.

Europe is not alone. The southern hemisphere sees people in transience too.  Here it seems it’s not just simply being born in the wrong place at the wrong time but also being born in the right place at the wrong time.  What will people in the future make of Baby Aysha? As doctors’ battled border guards in Brisbane and politicians find the way to compromise without giving in, what do people who wanted her to stay and people who wanted her to go really think? What did her parents think?  What do all mothers think? What do all fathers think?

The truth is we live in a world where something you have no control over has total control over your destiny.  Drowned on a refugee ship, just another piece of trafficker’s profit or captain of the ship at a global brand, is often just across a border away.

We are all human beings. This inequality is created and maintained by us. The future will want to know what we make of this.  What our politicians promise and prohibit.  What our media report.  While some children in the secure world are given iPads to occupy them, the children on these ships are given sleeping pills to keep them quiet.  That’s why so many drown when the ships sink.

What do those in the safe world who are secure and don’t risk their lives for a better life think of these people?  Do they open their hearts or close their minds?  What do these people from the unsafe world think, walking the globe for a better, safer life?

These are complex issues.  We must find a way to deal with complex issues differently.  If we don’t, we can already see what happens. Our world descends into hate, into racism, into isolation and into war.  We stay exactly where we are, locked in an old world with old world beliefs that are not fit for purpose today.

The future must feel what we feel, see what we see and know what we know.  When Alice Dreams, tell us what she sees so our future families can see it too.