The United States is asleep on the refugee issue. Wake up!
It’s falling on Europe’s lap, but we caused it. To paraphrase Colin Powell ‘we broke it- we own it’. Hungary did not invade Iraq. We did. We should accept at least a percentage in proportion to what Germany and Sweden are accepting. They are our human brothers and sisters. We are intelligent enough as a country to differentiate the terrorists from their helpless victims.
And many are coming from Iraq and Afghanistan. (Afghanistan is a different region.) The borders are somewhat irrelevant now in the area controlled by Isis. The point is that these are human beings and the United States is currently finding every excuse not to increase the concrete numbers of those we will accept. It is a disgrace. Anyone who thinks that the situation in Syria has nothing to do with Iraq does not understand the Middle East.
This president risks tarnishing his legacy permanently if he does not accept some responsibility and accept more refugees. A lot more.
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It is more than true that this refugee situation is a horror show, mainly because it is fodder for ongoing news coverage.
The nut of the problem is continuously swept under the rug. My thoughts come from Lincoln’s second inaugural. He outlined two important aspects of human life. Things that were once thought right come to be learned are wrong(slavery). The second flows from the first. The wrong produces woes. Abolitionary zeal, Civil War, racism. That wrong he called an offense, and if it is not corrected, woes continue.
So the woe here is starving and oppressed refugees, but the offense is oppressive social, political, and economic governance.
Harmful governance in Central America, Mexico, Cuba here in the Western Hemisphere have produced our own “refugees”.
Unless there is an understanding that all humans belong to the same species, and there is uniform agreement on what kind of government and society it takes to assure decent survival, these “offenses” will continue since the “woe” remains in place.
The real disgrace is what is missing in action. The world body, the UN, should be forefront in this mess. Governments or anarchy are acting routinely to interfere with the preservation of humankind. This means convincing all members of the Security Council, including Russia and China, that it is in their best interest in terms of peace, self development, and prosperity to stop such oppression wherever it exists. Those that buy in should be ready to give aid, and supply peace keeping forces(it may take a million or so) to separate belligerents. Next to start to improve governance and adhere to the goal of mutual decent survival.
So the telescope should be focused that clearly enlarges what must be done. Do we need another WWII to upset the apple carts enough to allow countries to reconstruct themselves so all citizens are served? In the instances where more arbitrary country making took place, the fabric of those nations fell apart.
When will we ever learn that our comfort on this Earth depends on each other, and our tribal instincts must be overridden. So we must take care of these refugees, but the UN should be rolling up its collective sleeves and start solving the real problem.