Thursday, September 22, 2016

Saddle up! [Immigration]


Grab your guns and saddle up! Circle the wagons! The immigrants are coming! Raise the drawbridge! Man the barricades! Close the gates! Build a wall! The shields are down! The immigrant hordes are at the door! They’re pouring through! Build a wall between us and Mexico! (1,989 miles) OMG! They’re digging tunnels! Deploy the anti-tunnel counter measures! Send out the armada, they’re coming up the coastline! (95,000 miles) Wait they’re coming through the Canadian border! Build another wall! (5,525 miles)
Sweet Jesus! There are 330 million legal crossings yearly between the United States and Mexico! Frisk them all! Stop legal crossings! We can’t trust the Mexicans! 300,000 people cross the Canadian border each day! Do we really trust the Canadians to do their job? A lot of them speak French! There are over 65 million tourists a year coming to America! We don’t know these people! They’re foreigners!
They aren’t our kind. Vet ‘em all!
I don’t believe that I have ever used this many exclamation points in a writing and I haven’t even talked about the number of refugees that want to come here! You know, people fleeing for their lives from various countries and all the continents. Well, except for Antarctica unless we count some penguins. I like penguins. They’re cute little buggers and walk funny. They walk like they’ve got all the time in the world unlike the starving refugees. People in a hurry can be so rude…but I digress.
 Lumping all people into categories like “immigrants” or “refugees” makes things easier than having to list them (or think of them) by color, age, gender, religious affiliation and geographical origins. It dehumanizes the huddled desperate masses to terms that we can deal with dispassionately. It gets too personal if we have to start thinking of them as people, families, individuals, teenagers, children, adults, seniors.
It’s easier for us if we just call them terrorists, criminals, rapists (They’re coming to defile our women!), ignorant, uneducated, disease-ridden, “not us”, dangerous people. That they’re the smallest of percentage of any group of people is immaterial. Stop them all. Put them in camps.
I have an idea that might help. How about we just let in the gardeners, restaurant workers, hotel workers, janitors and domestics? Oh wait! They’re already hear. Millions upon millions of them in all across the nation. Some of them are even watching our children. Some of them are doctors. Some are college educated. Good lord they’re in every walk of life. Some of them even go to churches here. They almost sound like a category of regular people.
There was an opportunity before WWII to make a difference and the free world took a pass like it’s doing now until it was almost too late. Eleven million Jews, Roma Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled, Poles (Hitler really had it in for the Poles), mentally infirm, the racially “inferior”, degenerates, Jehovah Witnesses, Catholic Priests, Christian Pastors and other innocents were killed.  
We have an opportunity to save refugees that are being slaughtered in the Middle East. There’s a new list. They’re the wrong kind of Muslim, Yazidi, Christian, Baha’i, homosexual - or just pick one - and are being killed for it. Think of it. A Christian nation that won’t even take in Christians. A Christian nation that turns away children. A Christian nation that breaks up families. This election should prove beyond a shadow of doubt that we are NOT a Christian nation. BTW We already have the camps – and they aren’t full of white people.
A would-be tyrant is waiting in the wings ready to take the stage. He’s already told us his plans. And millions of people love him for it. He’s going to make America great. It’s going to be a different kind of great. Like Fascist “great”.

Or, we could renew the vow of the lady in the harbor.