Voices: Be thankful you are not a refugee

MIAMI — As we spend another long Thanksgiving holiday weekend surrounded by family and friends, gathering together around food and football, it's a good time to give thanks for the most basic of gifts: a safe and comfortable home.

There has never been a more appropriate time to be thankful for what for so many is a luxury. Nearly 60 million people around the world are on the run, fleeing wars and persecution, a staggering number of refugees not seen since Europeans were forcibly scattered after World War II, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Things are far from perfect in the USA. Politics in Washington are more polarized than ever. Race relations suffered another devastating blow this week when video was released of a white Chicago police officer shooting a black teenager 16 times. If you're paying attention to the presidential debates, you couldn't be blamed for thinking the country is about to collapse.

Yet no matter how bad things may seem, remember  it could be far worse.

You could be living in the largest refugee camp in the world, a massive complex around Dadaab, Kenya, where more than 320,000 refugees have settled after fleeing the decades-long civil war in Somalia and famine throughout eastern Africa.

You could be one of the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority, who are not welcome in their home country of Burma. They have been barred from entering neighboring Bangladesh and have been attacked repeatedly by mobs of Buddhist monks.

You could be one of millions of Syrians fleeing their country's devastating civil war, making life-threatening journeys across the Mediterranean only to find you're not welcome in many European countries — or in the USA — because of fears that terrorists are in your midst.

You could be an Afghan living outside your country, waiting until a reliable central government emerges that can make life tolerable for you and your family. You could be an Iraqi fleeing Islamic State militants in the north or the never-ending Sunni-Shiite battles everywhere else.

You could be running from gang violence fueled by drug cartels in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador that has been so severe that those three countries rank in the top six of the world's highest homicide rates. You could be one of the more than 1,000 Cubans who fled their country's communist government but are  stuck in Central America, blocked by Nicaraguan officials from continuing their journey to the USA.

You could be trying to escape from Haiti as political turmoil chokes off the possibility of recovery after that country's devastating earthquake, only to find that you're not welcome in the neighboring Dominican Republic. You could be running from Colombia, home of the Western Hemisphere's longest-running civil war.

You could be a Ukrainian fleeing the war that rages in the eastern half of the country. You could be running from the wars tearing apart South Sudan, Libya or Yemen. You could be fleeing terrorism fueled by the extremist group Boko Haram in and around Nigeria.

All told, one out of every 122 people in the world  is a refugee, according to the United Nations.

I will  spend the holiday weekend surrounded by a pretty big group of former refugees: my family. They fled Cuba shortly after Fidel Castro took control of the island on New Year's Day 1959, starting their lives over in Miami.

Though the specifics of their refugee experience are unique, their reasons for uprooting their lives are not. Just like every other wave of refugees or other migrants, they left their homes, their belongings, their livelihoods behind to try to stake a claim in another part of the world, one where they would feel safer and their children had the possibility of a better future.

I was fortunate enough to be born in this country, because my parents and their relatives had the courage to take that terrifying risk. It's the same leap taken by all those millions of people who are living in tents, cramming into rickety boats or walking for miles and miles, searching for a border to cross and a new place to call home.

For those of us who have already found one, let's give thanks and hope that they find theirs, too.

Gomez is a Miami-based reporter for Paste BN who covers immigration.