Wednesday, June 20, 2018

If everyone cared about Americans who have been hurt by unlawful immigration

How liberals see anything done by non-liberals in America today
As much as we care about the sad spectacle of children being removed from their parents, we probably wouldn't have come to the point where children are being removed from their parents.  The problem would have been fixed long ago.  I thought of that as I was reminded of this old article from January in the National Review.  It's taking a look at the crime stats regarding immigration along the southern border of the US.

Now I'm not going to get into a slug fest over stats.  You know the old saying about statistics and liars.  But the fact is, some Americans died at the hands of immigrants who were here illegally.  That's a fact.  We won't talk about the strain that caring for illegal immigrants put on the monies used for America's least of these, as Democrats said back in the 90s.  Nor will we talk about the bizarre unspoken idea that laws only apply based upon your national origin and skin color.  We won't get into the idea that immigrants might actually take jobs from Americans who are most desperate for the jobs the immigrants have taken, or those DACA recipients who have wowed the critics by living their entire lives outside the law while making it through Ivy League universities and landing corporate level jobs in Silicon Valley, all while home grown Americans can barely digress from a traffic law without having their careers sideswiped.

Nope.  We're just taking Americans killed by immigrants.  And you know what happened when this was brought up over the last decade or so?  Not a damn thing. Sometimes you were mocked or laughed at.  Sometimes a bizarre stat about White Americans killing more people than Muslim Americans would be thrown at you (which is a bit like saying Californians shockingly kill more people than Rhode Islanders).  It was almost always explained away, laughed away, dismissed, mocked or just ignored.  After all, they're only Americans.  Over the last couple decades, they increasingly came last.

Which is one of the greatest evils of our age, this postmodern ethic whereby as long as [other] Americans die, it's the sacrifice I'm willing to make.  Add to that the modern racism, where you can always tell a racist who probably got what's coming to him by the color of his skin (and nationality), and you had a very robust disregard for those who died, perhaps by the hundreds, at the hands of illegal immigrants.

Note that the article is just talking about one part of the crime problem.  I know people will say you'll never stop all illegal immigration, so such tragedies are inevitable.  Just remember that the next time Gun Control activists insist that their solutions should be tried, even if they would do almost nothing, since saving even one life is worth everything.  Same here.  But the fact is that the conversation never even came to that.  You just couldn't get anyone to care.  Those who did care were mostly people along the border, who often were portrayed by the press as bigots and racists by default, if they were covered at all.

Of course now we all care.  Now we're in the throes of the new Holocaust.  Literally.  This is being compared to the Gestapo, to the Nazi SS, to Concentration camps and even to Auschwitz.  Trump is Hitler.  All who defend it are Hitler.  They are all wrong.  The Bible is clearly against it.  It's an affront to God.

And in almost every case, the ones screaming Hitler! the loudest today are the ones who stood aside and let the crickets do the talking when the suffering and even death of innocent Americans and their  children was appealed to for all those years.  Somehow I think the point of the Gospel isn't that people only matter when their suffering helps advance a political agenda.  Somehow I think the point is that people matter, and when they are suffering, we should do something to make sure they are helped without hurting other innocent people.  If we do that, maybe others won't suffer down the road, even if their suffering does make for advantageous political exploitation.

BTW, to understand Trump, one need only think on this issue.  Since the end of the Cold War, the Left was pushing us to a post-nation world; a one world global government.  Everything was going global. If Americans were hurt?  Eh.  If you cared about America (or England, Italy, Poland, or any other nation)? Eh.  Get over it.  Increasingly, anyone came before an American.  A stranger before my cousin, my cousin before my brother, and everyone before [other] Americans.  The press was fine with it, the Democrats thrived on it, popular culture embraced it, and many religious leaders were hip to the groove (after all, Jesus didn't come to establish America).   But Trump has thrown that on its head and said 'Nope, in fact my main concern is Americans.'  Perhaps he does it to a fault.  Maybe he goes overboard.  But he is caring for tens of millions of Americans who, up until 2016, were simply not that big of a deal for a growing number of leaders who used to care, at least when it was convenient.

2 comments:

  1. Jonathan Haidt an expert on moral psychology at NYU has stated that Human are the only animals that can organize themselves in to large scale societies where we aren't all members of the same family (like ant colonies are organized around a queen, who is the mother of all the members). He says that we do this by organizing
    ourselves around a sacred object (for the US that might be our enlightenment ideals). This requires an, other, so he thinks that the largest human society is the nation state. A global society would require a outside threat to the planet as a whole.

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    1. Possibly. As we move toward the dream of a global society, I fear there will be no shortage of 'them'. We've already seen it. I think one of the many reasons Trump won is because we had become content with the notion that our nation was joining a global economy, and it was just inevitable that some (perhaps many) poor, schmuck Americans would be left behind. When people pushed back, it became vogue to suggest that the ones complaining were just upset they had lost their white privilege (even if all those being left behind weren't necessarily white). So I have a feeling we'll just see new ways of defining those rascally 'them'.

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