Border Families

No. This is not America. Not my America, anyway.

We love our families. We love our relationships. These are the core of all social order. We protect the individual and the family unit. Period. That is the way of our social order. Has been from the very beginning. And if we claim to be religious – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, whatever… - we support both the individual and the family.

The two are inseparable. It is how our social order gets its order. We have kids and teach them, mold them, and enculturate them. Sometimes we get it wrong, but most of the time we produce some pretty great people out of all those kids! It is what makes America great.

Now we are supposed to believe that to deter immigrants from coming to our nation, we will separate parents from kids if their status is illegal. What happened to returning them as a family to a friendly country until they are processed into our nation? If they are refugees from an inhospitable country, of course we give them refuge. We will need to encamp them – house, feed, care for their medical needs – while they await processing. We have done this. We have a duty to do this. We cannot just dump them back to where they came from. In some of those countries, they would return to certain death.

Respect for human life is a fundamental cornerstone of our culture.

Making America Great Again evidently doesn’t get this basic value.

As a matter of fact – that is f a c t – all of us came from immigrant families coming to America. Each of us have these roots. We may be several generations away from our original forbears who entered America, but we are immigrant stock just the same.

Legal or illegal status has nothing to do with it.

Managing the masses of people who wish to enter our country is the primary issue. So ramp it up and manage them. We can do this. We rebuilt Europe after World War II. We can do this, too.

And in an age of terrorism, we can handle the complexity as well. It is not an excuse to lower ourselves to the status of the terrorist to protect our nation. That would be our abasement, and self-inflicted.

Take a deep breath and soldier on! We have work to do. Welcome the newcomers one and all. Manage their presence in our land. And filter out the trouble makers as best we can. For now, keep kids with parents.

It is the right thing to do. And we all know this fundamental.

Do it!

May 30, 2018