“We had humanity. We had concern for our fellows. We would never leave a man behind. It just wasn’t done…Doesn’t look like it any more, does it?” Thaddeus Howze, on the humanitarian crisis at the border.
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I was thinking about the humanitarian crisis at the border regarding these children who are trekking thousands of miles from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, through Mexico, to get to the United States.
What I find most curious is the response to these children in the echo chambers that is our media and the people who feel as if these children are a plot to destabilize our government. My reaction of sympathy for their plight has not been mirrored in the news. Instead what I see is a radicalized perspective that says these children need to be sent home, right now, as fast as technology will allow.
Instead, I propose a different scenario, a bit of ‘let’s pretend’ as it were. I am not saying any of this could happen, but let’s imagine anyway… Cue wavy lines…
FRACTURED AMERICA
In some event perpetuated by disenfranchised recent veterans and our nation’s crazed and ever-growing number of armed militias, a coup against the US government is attempted. The Radical Right, sides with the crazed militias, and our local government is thrown into chaos. The armed militias take over smaller, local governments and dig themselves in all over the nation. With the police destroyed in the Alpha strike of the militias, there is no one to prevent these militias from gunning down citizens as armed gangs gun down citizens in the streets.
The United States government declares martial law, but this does not stop the violence. Armed forces loyal to the government have a hard time battling their former brothers in arms, so the fights are slow going and entrenched. Adding to the difficulty is the militia’s tendency to use women and children as human shields.
This is where the problem begins. Children, being prompted by relatives begin to run away in the dead of night. Women and children make their way to the Mexican and Canadian borders, dodging, running, or fighting their way out of the United States.
The Mexican government suddenly inundated with tens of thousands of refugee Americans, does its best to care for these dispossessed individuals. But between the criminal cartels and the overwhelming flood of US citizens, the government is reduced to placing these citizens in warehouses and stacking them thirty to a prison cell.
Since we are playing let’s pretend, we shall say it will take fifteen to twenty years for this problem to be effectively negotiated. In the meantime, Canada and Mexico will take in nearly a million refugees apiece. This places a huge strain on both governments and eventually both will blockade their borders, keeping US citizens from coming to either country under threat of death.
However the citizens who have gone to both countries have been treated as well as their capacity will allow. Everyone is given health screenings, and general care. They are fed and clothed and eventually they are given training in Spanish in order to help them assimilate into Mexican culture. In Canada, the Americans have a much easier time of it, since English is a more accepted and commonly spoken language there.
Seventy percent of the American Refugees are women and children. What would you want our neighbors to the North and South to do for our refugees if they told the governments they would be killed if they were repatriated back to the homes in the United States?
Would you be cool with either government placing thirty Americans into five by eight cells and squeezing up to thirty people at a time into those cells? Would you want them to be handcuffed everywhere they went, manhandled cruelly by anyone who worked there?
Adding insult to injury, the local citizens protest the existence and government’s assistance to these citizens of the United States thrust upon them. They rally, carry signs, and weapons indicating the government should send them back to the States post haste. Would you, modern Americans be in favor of such wretched treatment of Americans in our time of need? Would you sanction sending Americans back home where they may be abused, tortured or killed by radicalized militias?
THE ‘RIGHT’ WAY
This is the rhetoric being spoken by the radical Right. Put them on boats, trains, planes, and send them back to Mexico where they came from. Alas, they are not Mexicans. They’re from South of Mexico. Central America to be exact. Mexico is in the same boat that we’re in. Refugees are coming north from Central America seeking a chance to escape being murdered or becoming murderers on the streets of their home nations.
An interview on NPR given by a vocally-disguised member of one of the warehouses workforce where these immigrant children were held indicated they were treated poorly, stacked like cord wood into environments that were crowded, unsanitary and potentially unsafe.
The children are being treated like terrorists thanks to the political rantings of people like Rick Perry who accuses President Obama of importing these children as part of a radical Islamic plot against America. He is delusional in this regard, but it doesn’t stop him from placing the seeds of dissent into the echo chamber that is our nation’s radical news services.
Have we really become a nation so afraid of tolerance, of being bigger than our issues, we would marginalize children? Are we so afraid of change that we are considering mobilizing militias to the border to defend our sovereignty, shooting children who cross the border on sight?
Have we become a nation of cowards, that the best we can do is to send children, who though no fault of their own are displaced? Are we perfectly okay with the idea we would be shipping these children back to people who would most assuredly kill them as part of a national policy?
What if the Native Americans had considered similar ideas as a part of their national policy? Are we so lacking in imagination, we allow talking heads like Rick Perry, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh to determine what we should do about humanitarian issues like this one?
I say to you, no. No one should be returned to a nation where the end result is that they will be killed. We are better than that. We, as a nation, are not those cowering idiots shown on FOX News terrorizing children trapped in a hell they did not create.
THE OLD NEW COLOSSUS
Where is your decency America? Where is your compassion? What happened to those ideals you used to espouse? The sonnet “The New Colossus” on the tablet mounted inside The Statue of Liberty has a collection of famed closing lines that every schoolchild used to know:
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Have we become North Korea, Lite? Except we don’t shoot you in the head and you disappear with government approval? Here we just ship you back to your oppressed land and let them spend the money on bullets…
Everyone loves freedom as long as it isn’t inconvenient. As long as they are the only ones getting it. Freedom ain’t free. Someone is always having to pay for it. Soldiers who laid their lives on the line and paid the price ante up for our collective freedoms. Veterans who come back from war forever transformed physically and mentally have also paid a steep cost.
Police officers who remember what ‘Protect and Serve’ stands for pay it daily. School teachers, fire-fighters, nurses and doctors who deal with the long term effects of what it means to make society run pay it. They don’t make money though they alter the fabric of all of our lives. If you believe in the Greater Good, do your part for the community and think about your fellow man as you would yourself, you understand what I’m talking about.
My America does not abandon children.
Even the children of my enemies are still children. They deserve the opportunity to grow up and make better choices than their parents did. While we cry about the cost of what these tens of thousands of immigrants cost, we have yet to stop making stealth bombers, cruise missiles, and over-priced fighter jets like the F-35. Where the cost of two or three of those pieces of military hardware might make the difference in the lives of these children (not to mention millions of American children).
We are complaining about immigrants in a land OF immigrants. No one here save the Native Americans should have anything to complain about. Most of our ancestors came here to escape some condition, oppressive governments, religions, or starvation were just three of the forces that drove the original immigrants of this nation to its shores.
We should be looking at immigrants as people doubly motivated to succeed. They have burned their ships upon landing, their countries of origin are on fire and they have no place to return to. They would be both doubly committed and doubly grateful to find themselves in a place that welcomed their energy, their vitality and their creativity.
We could raise these children to believe in an America that does the right thing even when it’s hard. Even when we are afraid of what their arrival might mean. We can raise these children to be the best America has to offer because they were saved by the best of us.
Or we can turn them away and return them to their fates. And when the day comes when we are in need of such support (and it may come sooner than any of us expect) no one will blink an eye at OUR wretched refuse floating away from our former glory. We have fallen off the wagon of being a great example. We have degenerated to being the biggest bully on the block…er planet.
What happened to the United States being the light in the darkness? What happened to us leading by example? There was a time if we saw other countries treating refugees like we’re doing we would have intervened and told those countries about human rights violations and how they needed to get their act together. What happened to defending the weak, righting the wrongs? When did we become so damn afraid of anything different than we are?
We used to say, it was our differences that made us great. Do you remember the Codetalkers of World War Two who used their native tongues as part of a cipher that was unbreakable by the Axis threat? To be fair, we were still working out our issues as we also had Japanese Americans sitting in internment camps at the same time…
FEAR AND LOATHING
If you cannot be roused by national pride in what we say were about, then open your imagination to this:
Imagine you escaped your home. Men raided it and killed your family. Or maybe they threatened to kill your family if you didn’t join their gang. You fled. You had no idea where you would go. You do know this, you can’t stop moving. Someone will find you and kill you. You’re a child ten to seventeen years of age. So you run. No place will take you in for long. You live on the streets as part of a group of dispossessed children, scavenging from the edges of society. Just a little better than a feral animal.
You do what it takes to survive. Go there mentally for a moment. Imagine doing whatever it takes; lying, cheating, stealing, selling yourself if necessary. Then you hear a rumor. You have no idea if it’s true. Get some money, pay some people and you can make it to the United States. They will take you in as a refugee and you will be able to stay. You have no idea what a refugee is. You only know you will be safe there. Everyone knows how wonderful the Estados Unidos is.
You do the unthinkable to get the money. Even if you are eleven or twelve. You figure it out. Then they do the unimaginable. They leave all that they know and make a journey over fifteen hundred miles through some of the most hostile terrain on the planet. Constantly hungry, unkempt, abused and ask yourself: How many of them didn’t survive the journey? How many bodies on this new Trail of Tears are there littering the path to the United States? Ask one of them, they can tell you how many didn’t make the trip on their run.
When they get here, instead of welcome and blessed relief from fear, the fantasy of opportunity and freedom, we give them deluxe accommodations in an overcrowded prison. With people who barely can barely communicate with them and the reward for their efforts, lives lost, suffering is to be sent home, in all most likely scenarios, to die.
While they are here, we show them just how badly behaved we can be. They probably don’t speak English but that’s okay because danger, fear and hatred translate real well. In one fell stroke we destroy their dreams and eventually their lives.
LEAVING MEN BEHIND
I know what you’re thinking. Not my problem. Not my fault. I can’t do anything about it. But you see, it is your problem. The international community has been dealing with war torn refugees for decades. Pick a war or conflict, pick a part of the world, there are refugees moving from it, to it, through it, around it. Sudan, Congo, Syria, Iran, Iraq, the list goes on. It is only our great distance from those conflicts that has made us unaware of the constant movement of people across the planet seeking refuge somewhere.
We are, as usual, setting a great example, all across the world. In a nation blessed with almost anything our hearts desire, we lack the one thing that would make it all worthwhile. Putting up with Sarah Palin, an out of control gun lobby, Eric Cantor, the lack of campaign finance reform, Rick Perry, the failure of the EPA to regulate anything in the toxic waste state that is Texas, militias and their zeal for Open Carry, we had one thing that made living here worth all of that other bullshit.
We had humanity. We had concern for our fellows. We would never leave a man behind. It just wasn’t done. We were a nation of immigrants from different eras to be sure, but we believed in diversity making us greater and proving that through the centuries as we grew up as a nation, trying to improve how we looked at each other. We believed in a Greater Good.
Doesn’t look that way anymore, does it?
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Photos: [main] matteocatanese / flickr [insert] freedom house / flickr, [inset] iamagenious / flickr
Lola Rainey The myth of the “American Dream” is a poisonous lie we sell to poor people all over the world. The life of the refugees and asylees we bring to this country is brutal. Once the initial joy of being here wears off, these new arrivals must confront the reality of what it means to be extremely poor and largely uneducated members of a society that sees them as disposable, human commodities. We love to tell the world we are a compassionate people but our history and policies tell a different story. In fact, do you honestly believe the… Read more »
BTW, we still have our humanity, as evidenced by this debate. But we also live in a different reality and there is only one way to support your humanitarian and rather Utopian vision. And because of seriously failed policies and political agenda, from both the right and the left, we will not have the means to do it. Really. That is not hyperbole. I would suggest that those pro illegal folks sponsor, directly, a family or two. You’d be responsible for their health, food, housing, AND any behavioral issues. Put your name on the line here for your beliefs. Haven’t… Read more »
You’ve written alot, and most of it well written. You’ve forgotten though that much of this has been caused by the excesses and the moral superiority of the far left. Witness the corruption in government today. The IRS, The EPA in particular, the general nastiness if you don’t agree with their viewpoint. No one faults the incoming trying to figure out a better way of life. Really. We don’t. We all get that. But this fight is NOT about the , BTW, call them for what they are, ILLEGAL immigrants. It is about the failure of the American government for… Read more »
Ignorance and the herd mentality is rampant with this issue. I agree 100% that we need to secure our borders. A few years back Al Qaeda contacted the gang MS13 (Central American street gang) about getting them into the US through the Mexican/United States border. They refused but it goes to show just how dangerous having a porous border can be. With that said, what does it say about us as a nation, as a people, that we could be so cold as to say “send them back” and rally against them as they sleep on cold concrete floors and… Read more »