BY VERN TURNER
Imagine the agony of sending a loved one away on an unknown journey, because to remain means almost certain death. Now, imagine that loved is your 8-year old child.
You just scraped together every cent you could to send him or her to El Norte, aka the United States of America. You may not believe that El Norte is still the haven for the desperate, but your desperation for your child’s life and safety overrides your doubts. The reason you are desperate for your child is the drug wars in Latin America.
Our revered Statue of Liberty’s inscription says:
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breath free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
This is what drew many of our ancestors here to make this country great. They actually believed they could do something great even if it was just making the next generation better than the previous ones. It worked for a while.
We took in the refugees and nurtured them until we could sort out our differences and integrate them into our greatness. The current condition at our U.S. border with Mexico calls into question that greatness.
The 50,000 desperate children coming to our “golden door” are refugees from countries so dangerous that their only choices are becoming drug-running gangsters, the whores of gangsters or dead.
What they are seeing when they arrive at our borders is a screeching minority of “ambassadors” carrying hateful signs, strange, silly flags and screaming insults while telling these children they are not welcome.
Where do these people presume the children should go?
Our politicians only make the nation look more foolish, craven and heartless to the rest of the world. Most of these want to send the children back to their “choices.” The least worthy of these politicians want to send soldiers to the border to gaze into Mexico since they have no legal policing authority. This plan will cost the taxpayer’s money for nothing while the troops impede the Border Patrol trying to do the right thing.
This migration of desperate children is primarily the result of drug use by American citizens. Some portion of our population insists on putting illegal drugs up their noses, into their veins and down their throats to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year. Heroin, for example, is making a big comeback as the drug of choice around the world. Heroin comes from opium poppies grown in Asia. The heroin is processed, packaged and transported to South, Central and North America, Europe and Africa in a massive network of “connections” made famous in books and movies. The cocaine, illicit pills and methamphetamine not made in the U.S. also follows this archipelago of transport for the habits of Americans bored, lazy and foolish enough to use them. That selfishness masks the consequences that we are now seeing at our Southern border.
Our overall behavior threatens our own perception of greatness as a nation to say nothing of the perception elsewhere. Every refugee turned away and sent back to a life of horror and/or death is another brick taken from the foundation of our original greatness.
Will we ever recognize our own shame?
For those trying to do right by these children, my heart sings out for your walking the walk of greatness. I hope your kind will become our next governing body.
For those whining, complaining and fear-mongering about desperate, frightened children running for their lives, I invite you to retrace their steps back to THEIR countries and see how it feels to be desperate and on your own.
– Vern Turner is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer. He lives in Marble Falls, TX, where he writes a regular column for the River Cities Daily Tribune. He is the author of three books – A Worm in the Apple: The Inside Story of Public Schools, The Voters Guide to National Salvation and Killing the Dream: America’s Flirtation With Third World Status – all available through Amazon.com.
