> When it comes to the refugee crisis, you have to acknowledge that people are afraid.

I would say they are also made afraid, and the people who push for stuff like cutting social welfare to be able to cut taxes for the rich. I'm simplifying, but the people who are afraid of refugees have more in common with those refugees than with the "1%" of their own country. It's not resources are allocated sanely as is, or as if these people aren't threatened either way, refugees or not.

> But at some point you have to accept that humans are tribal

True, but even Charles Darwin was looking forward to "our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings". Not that I disagree with you, specifically, I don't think that just taking on refugees really solves the problem.

But I think it's also okay to simply tell people what you see, not so much what they would prefer to hear. They want a good future for their children, they need to also consider the children murdered by the war profiteers they let act, that derive most of their power and all their legitimation from them. Otherwise, they are correct to be afraid, since once the declared that might is right, that looking the other way is okay, they now have to be in constant war and if they cease for just one second, someone else might do to them what they do to others.

Going against that cycle would be an actually selfish thing to do, in the sense of personal and community hygiene, not to mention leaving your children a heritage to be proud of -- instead of the trained pseudo-selfishness where a politician says "we" when they send people to war, but "I and my buddies" when it comes to reaping the plunder, and some people still say "yeah, let us do that, Uncle Sam and I are like this, America first!!" and charge out, to make someone else rich and get some PTSD if they're lucky. Not that it's specific to the US at all, this identification with the powerful when it comes to bleeding and/or murdering for them, and the respectful distance when it comes to wealth and privilege, or even just clothes, shelter and medicine.

History is full of dedicated individuals or groups that changed a lot, both for better and worse, precisely because they didn't ask other people what to think of their own convictions -- they asked their convictions what to think of other people, if anything. The people who don't against the grain today would do the same in a completely different setting, and it does not take all of them to change that setting. Beating around the bush and trying to please ages very badly, while the opposite is true for being candid.

If you think someone has accidentally set their child on fire, would you first tell them something more palatable to make them go look, or blurt it out? Let's say some would shut you down without investigation for saying something they don't want to hear -- while others would take you seriously, but then never forgive or trust you, because you didn't tell them that their kid was burning right away. You cannot "have" both, so which group would you rather organize with? Does it depend on the size of the groups? If people need special treatment and sugar to make the medicine go down now, what if the going gets much harder, and the truths even more uncomfortable?