A least 1 million people are hoping to arrive in Europe this year. Countries such as Serbia are seeing up to 10,000 people a day come across their borders. People come from everywhere and carry their only belongings with them. Some come on foot, others in rickety boats prone to sinking. The immigrants include babies in strollers, old people hobbling along on canes and tree branches, young mothers and fathers with their life savings carried in a sock.

It is estimated that there are at least 60 million displaced people wandering the Earth right now in search of a new home and a new start. They are bringing with them the dawn of a new age, reports The New York Times. This is the largest displacement and mass movement of people since the end of World War II and, at the rate it is continuing, could easily eclipse those days.

Much of the media coverage has been primarily dealing with the vast exodus happening in Syria as thousands are fleeing the civil war there. But that is only part of the story. The exodus mentality has seemed to grip many people in many lands. Many thousands continue to leave such places as Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq. Untold thousands are leaving many African nations too. People, it seems, are simply fed up with the conditions where they had been living. Continuous war and violence coupled with grinding and unrelenting poverty have forced people to seek better lives for themselves elsewhere. Elsewhere, for now, seems to be the European and Scandinavian countries.

This, it seems, is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There is already 6 million displaced people wandering around Syria along with another 4 million or so who have fled to Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. Yemen is a highly unstable and dangerous place and people there are poised to make a run for it as soon as they are able. There is a 5 million people strong minority of Christians in Egypt, known as the Copts, who may have to leave as they continue to worry over their safety in the Muslim country.

The world has seen similar movement in the recent past as 1.1 million left Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989 and 700,000 left their homes when Yugoslavia was broken up in 1993. The challenge that is so stark and so potentially explosive is not so much the fact that they have left but more about the nightmares they left behind.