We live in troubled times. Maybe not all of us but most of us can sense the growing distrust among people. It may be Europe which has been devastated by multiple attacks recently or the war ravaged middle east. And more recently the feeling of distrust has been growing here at home in USA.

I am completely in agreement that these attacks and wars are devastating for everyone. I also believe that these attacks need to stop. I just don’t agree with the methodology we have started adopting around this. We are starting to close our doors (and our hearts) to people. We believe this will stop the next attack or the next war.

Let me give you a simple anecdote: Gun violence kills more than 100 times people as terrorism within US and against US citizens abroad kill. Have we banned the guns yet?

We are trying to lock a group of people away from our lands. And since when did lands become personal property. The world is a shared natural resource and everyone has the right to live just the same as you and me. These people would only push harder against you for locking them away.

We are trying to solve a problem by locking people up and turning a blind eye to what happens in future. Each person turned away from this country or another has the potential to take this event and turn it into hatred. Since we decided to turn away everyone including scientists and researchers and people who served with military, are we not in essence turning these amazing people against this country (and perhaps all of humanity). It would reinforce everything we are fighting against and just add more fuel to this growing fire of war around this world.

This year one of the thing I wanted to learn was Compassion. It is a simple word but hard to practice. How do we show compassion? Why do we need to show compassion? These were some of the questions I was trying to answer. I live in a world where we are starting to build walls around countries and cities and even around ourselves within our mind. We are taught to distrust people and be self-sufficient. I was trying to find answers that would make compassion seem like a sensible approach in our current world.

One of the things I realized was that if building walls was the answer, why havent we solved the problems of destruction already? We have been building these actual and virtual walls for years now, yet the anger and destruction has only grown. Have you ever tried to deal with a hurt or angry person with more anger? Have you tried to tell them to go away and not bother you? Has that ever worked? NO

The simple answer to this was that building walls didn’t work. What works is to talk, to show empathy, to show compassion. Have you ever tried to console an angry person? Have you tried to ever show compassion to people who are suffering? That feels good. That solves the problems. That calms people and encourages them to find solutions.

If you build walls, the only thing people would think about is how to break the wall? And if they get more angry, they just want to destroy everyone who lives on the other side of the wall.

Somewhere within me I was sure that compassion serves a purpose. I was convinced on why we needed it. However I was not sure why we needed it. And there I realized that compassion can be as much a survival strategy. Simply speaking, compassion has helped protect human beings for years and centuries. We are alive because somewhere people had compassion. We have not survived due to anger. We survived due to compassion.

Compassion is about understanding the context of what people are doing and realizing that you might have to give up a little bit of your short term discomfort to get long term gain. If you show compassion to people immigrating to US or Europe, if you welcome them into your small home and give them a chance to live, they would repay you in orders of magnitude more love. How many people are millionaires because of companies started by Immigrants? How many people are alive due to research by these so called Immigrants?

The root cause I realized is that our memory works selectively. It surfaces the bad deeds by people very easily and tends to forget all the good deeds equally easily. We can remember only the hurt immigrants have caused but not the joy and prosperity they bring.

In these difficult times, have compassion. I assure you, over the course of your life, you would reap great benefits because people grow and love together, and left alone, they become inhumane and angry and willing to kill.

Mr. Trump, if you have ever bought a product from company founded by immigrants, if you have ever made money on companies started by immigrants, if you have ever loved an immigrant (read Melania), stop this foolishness and find solutions to change middle east instead of isolating it.