Nowhere to go?

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I saved and deleted all of my Bubblews posts about a year ago. Occasionally I look back over them, checking to see what I was thinking about back then, before deleting the ones that are rubbish. In the September 2014 file, I came across a couple of old posts which possibly tell two sides of the same story. The first is from a curious article I wrote about toilets, and as yesterday was World Toilet Day it seems timely to recycle this part of it: "Almost 2.5 billion people - more than one third of all those alive today - don't have access to a proper toilet. More people die each year from diseases caused by this lack of hygiene than succumb to AIDS, malaria, Ebola and tuberculosis combined. Diarrhoea is the world's second biggest cause of child death." The second of these September posts now seems oddly prescient. It is about human migration, and how it will change our world. Here is some of what I wrote: "I suspect this will be the single biggest issue of the current century. Displacement of populations through war, disaster, discrimination and poverty has always been commonplace, but now there is also a tide of people who simply want a share of what we, the lucky ones, already have that they do not. "What are the lessons here? First, that understanding and appreciating other creeds and races will become more important than ever before. Most of us will shortly have neighbors who are extrinsically quite different to ourselves, and we'll need to get along. "Second, our former notions of "culture" will need to be remade. What it means to be British, or French, or American will not be the same for your children as it was for your parents. "And third, we should be seriously rethinking our global footprint. How much of the wealth are we really entitled to? And how much of it are we willing to share? We need to accept that the poor and downtrodden know what we have, and it will be difficult to blame them for wanting part of it too. "How we deal with these issues will shape this century, I believe. Each war we do nothing to prevent, each natural disaster we don't respond to adequately, each child who grows up without education or basic needs, each affront to human rights we ignore, these will all have a say in the way our world looks in the next decade or two. "It seems to me we have a simple choice. We can either do more to help those less fortunate than ourselves, right now, or we can expect many more new neighbors in the next few years." If you made it this far, thanks for reading.