I may have lost a friend today. Sure, a FB friend. But also someone I have known for 11 years, who was once a mentor of sorts to me at my day job.
She had the audacity to post something cheering on the congress for voting to block allowing Syrian refugees to come to our country—you know, the one where there is some green lady standing on an island with a golden torch, urging people to come on over.
Anyway, I don’t know if I lost her or not. I told her I was calling her out because “feedback is love.”
You see, I feel that I have some small stake in taking a stand in support of the Syrian refugees (and of course there may be at least one detractor among the Kossacks to call bullshit on me. Read on….).
I posted on 11/11 about my father, who fought against the Allies in WWII. But I also have the other contributor to my gene pool: my mother.
She was a refugee. OK, she was a CAUCASIAN, non-Arab refugee. A Lithuanian girl of 12 fleeing the Soviets. As most homeless refugees, her mother, brother and she went for the shortest distance between two points—and she and her immediate family were accepted by the Reich as an ethnic German. Still a refugee, but an ethnic German (actually, I always found it ironic that she—whose maiden name was outright Lithuanian—was considered an ethnic German, but the part of her family that actually bore a Germanic name could not obtain Volksdeutsch status. Go figure! The German-name-sounding part of the family eventually made it to the US several years before my folks did, and they sponsored my family for immigration to the US).
So mom was a refugee. She had spent 4 years in a refugee camp in occupied Poland, learned German there, gained some semblance of formal education—although she never completed grade school—and became a teenager there. And when the Red Army headed toward her camp, she and her mother headed West. Mom found herself in Dresden in February 1944 as a refugee, like unknown thousands of refugees from the east, in fact. It was only through good fortune that she ended up in a cattle car in the outskirts of Dresden, instead of near the main train station as she originally was supposed to be. Of course, you would not be reading this if she had done what she was supposed to do, I suppose. (FYI, for those not entirely clear on what I’m talking about, you can read about it here).
Fast forward to today. My friend, Lois, posted something that I found obnoxious: “That would be enough to override any Obama veto.....Even the Democrats agree with this one and it's nice to see them finally working together.” This was referring to this headline, courtesy of a Fox affiliate in my city: “House of Representatives approves bill to halt Syrian refugees, 289-137.”
And so I took exception to this, asking first if this was solely because of her dislike of PBO, and quoting that magical set of verses from the Book of Matthew to hammer home the point about helping those in need. I closed it out by stating that my mother was a refugee. She merely responded, “I'm sure your parents came here, worked hard and learned the language. And Germany was not terrorizing our country killing because of hate. It’s just a matter of safety right now.” (For those of you playing at home, read those words carefully and note the unfortunate irony dripping from them).
Well, it starts to escalate, as I explain that my own mother was a refugee, survived the phosphorus bombing of Dresden as a refugee and as such should not be considered an exception as a refugee. Then she said: “I’m just stating my opinion, as you have yours. I'm not looking to start an argument with anyone just because their views are different than mine.”
Opinion?
OPINION?!
WHERE IS YOUR HUMANITY?!?! IT’S NOT SOME GODDAMNED OPINION! IT’S LIFE OR DEATH!
It all went downhill from there. Her Fox News talking point-spewing hubby stepped in, insulting me as a communist and terrorist-loving asshole like my president (adding that PBO’s middle name is Hussein—always a favorite of the knuckle-dragging set, believing it to be some sort of insult). He punctuated it all with “Deal with it.”
So I could lose a friend. It’s too bad, really. She is a good person at heart. And perhaps I wear my emotions on my sleeve. It’s gotten me into a bit of trouble here and there.
But here’s the point to all of this: the common thread. Ask any refugee if they would have rather have stayed in their home, in their country, if circumstances (economically, politically, etc.) allowed them to stay. The answer, I would posit, is a resounding, unanimous YES! The difference, in the eyes of a 60-something pasty white native born south side Milwaukeean who has neither ventured across the ocean, nor north of the 46th parallel nor south of the Rio Grande, is that my family is Caucasian. And Syria is full of terrorists. Well, we just found out that the Paris attacks were perpetrated by long-time residents of the EU (and citizens as well). Riddle me that one.
I don’t want to paint a broad brush, but the overwhelming majority of us fit into this category: We progressives see the big picture quite clearly. We are more readily empathic toward the plight of the downtrodden. We recognize that, as a society, we are only as strong as the weakest link. And—silly commie pinko us—we seem to think that America once stood for something greater than the individual or even the body of citizens: a beacon of light in the darkness for all who yearn for freedom of thought, freedom from persecution and the pursuit of happiness.
But it seems like now is not the America that I thought it was when I was a child—when I first heard about what a Lithuanian refugee went through.
I visited my mother today, and we watched the news. When the story came on about the House of Representatives voting against allowing the refugees, all I heard was a sigh, followed by: “These are different days,” in her still noticeable Lithuanian accent, softened with a touch of Wisconsin twang. When I looked toward her, I saw a tear.
Indeed. These ARE different days. But the story remains the same. And history, unfortunately, seems to repeat itself. Same story, different country.
Ignorance is no excuse.