Now imagine they killed our families and razed our crops and burned our villages - leaving desolation and famine in their wake! We can imagine any kind of nigh

Now imagine they killed our families and razed our crops and burned our villages - leaving desolation and famine in their wake! We can imagine any kind of nightmarish scenario we like, but that doesn't mean we should ignore all the people who are doing better. Imagine if our social policy was to only help people who had escaped war-torn famine, and tell everyone else to suck it up! So the protagonist in the story could be in a much worse place, but it still sucks for him. You have to be pretty callous not to have some empathy for him.