Imagine the city in which you learned how to ride a bike reduced to rubble and ash, battered streets indistinguishable amongst crumbling buildings. Imagine looking up and seeing attack aircrafts dot the wide expanse of the sky, flying in formation like geese to carry out strike after strike. Imagine being caught in the crosshairs of a war unlike any you’ve ever heard of or read about where your national military uses chemical weapons against fellow citizens, and terrorist groups seize land, that belonged to your relatives, coworkers, or friends.

Imagine the fear coating your insides day in and day out. Imagine the uncertainty that presses against your chest like a lead weight. The horror. The confusion. The grief. To imagine this is to understand the anguish and desperation that refugees experience.

Wael and Sameera Abbas are two such people. They fled civil unrest in Syria on their own two feet several years ago, leaving behind almost everything and everyone they had ever known. They lived with their daughters in Jordan for several years while completing the extensive Homeland Security application process before being resettled in apartments at St. Chrysostom’s Episcopal Church in the Gold Coast district of Chicago. They did not want to become citizens of the United States illegally. They wanted to live legitimate lives, away from the fear and squalor of the refugee camps and the chaos of their war-torn homeland.

My family and I have been members of the congregation at St. Chrysostom’s for as long as I can remember, and have only just gotten a mere glimpse of what it might be like to be forced out of the place you call home. There are people just like the Abbas family – men, women, and children – who went through the legal process but found themselves stuck at airports across the nation last month under President Trump’s executive order.

This order was and still is fundamentally un-American. The federal courts agree, and despite the fact that they have taken up arms against it, the mere fact that it existed – exists – is deeply troubling.

In tumultuous times like these, it’s both easy and natural to want to separate ourselves from others in order to feel safe. By deeming other human beings unsafe, we feel a certain artificial security that can be intoxicating, especially when that narrative is perpetuated by our leaders. But who we are as individuals is not defined solely by nationality or religion.

Refugees are not immigrants, although immigrants are a critical component of our history as Americans. Today, while immigrants voluntarily move to different countries to seek a more prosperous life or to better provide for their families (among other reasons), refugees are fleeing their own home countries due to political unrest, armed conflict, or general fear.

For those of us who aren’t descended from the men and women who traveled across the Atlantic on the Mayflower, we are the trees that have grown from our immigrant roots. The backbone of this country is the people who uprooted their lives–either by choice, or keeping in mind our country’s devastating history of slavery, by force.

The last family from Syria that was received in Chicago was welcomed by Ann Shalom, a synagogue in Glencoe. Some members of this synagogue have a living memory of relatives who escaped Europe during World War II or of being refugees themselves. They know all too well the price of indifference –torment, agony, and suffering.

We are the sum of our actions and words, our thoughts and beliefs. This idea is not grounded in starry-eyed idealism–I am a member of a generation that is not shocked when learning of a terrorist attack, because the past two decades have taught us not to be.

While I understand that it is easy to drink the Kool Aid of apathy, do not be fooled–there are consequences, and you need only look back a few days, months, years, or decades to see. The opposite of love is not hate–it’s indifference, pure and simple.