The Mule and tte 2x4

The world is now getting the message about the Syrian refugee crisis, but the mule needed a few blows to the head with that large piece of wood to hear it. Those blows have included story after story about the loss of “boat people,” and, of course, the heart-wrenching photo of the dead toddler in the red shirt washed up on a beach.

But this is not exactly a new problem, and it’s more than just about Syria. The UN has been reporting on the enormous scale of the Middle East refugee situation for years, perhaps one of the worst in our memories. Millions have been prompted to leave their homes. What’s different now is that local “coyotes” have been selling seats in substandard boats. Some have sunk. Others have made it to various European shores, with the refugees receiving varying degrees of welcome.

In Syria, it started in 2011, when the ultra-thin-skinned Bashir al-Assad decided he couldn’t put up with a relatively small number of demonstrators protesting conditions in his country. For the most part, they weren’t even interested in removing him from power. Years before that, in fact, there were news stories about what a progressive leader he was. But his response to the unrest was to turn the country’s army against his own people. I still remember the two brave CNN reporters, both women, who were on TV night after night reporting from the shelled cities, and the late Stanford fellow Fouad Ajami providing his comments about the dire situation to Anderson Cooper. The West did very little more than shake its head.

Then there were the reports that Assad’s army was using chemical weapons, and President Obama drew a “line in the sand,” which sounded very good – but did it sort of say that the use of conventional weapons before that to kill hundreds of thousands was OK? You be the judge. And then the Russians said, back off, we’ll handle this. BTW, I wonder how many refugees the Russians are taking in these days.

Some of the EU countries are less than happy about having to deal with this. By contrast, Germany welcomed tens of thousands just last weekend – more asylum-seekers than the country accepted during all of 2007. Germany may accept as many as 800,000 before all is said and done. So far, the U.S. has taken in about 1,500, but pressure is mounting for us to do more.

No, we aren’t to blame for this problem, but we do have some responsibility to help. We did virtually nothing in Syria, and maybe way too much in Iraq, and haven’t really followed through in Libya. But there are lots of people needing help, just as there are after a natural disaster like an earthquake. And it’s time we stepped up to do our share – not assume the entire burden, just our share.

While I’m not into animal abuse, the mule has to wake up sometime.

Thank You, Mr. Trump

Donald Trump is right. His comments about Mexican “rapists” and impregnable border fences, outrageous though they may be, have forced his fellow Republicans, and the rest of us, to talk about immigration. It’s truly the “elephant in the room” on many levels.

It’s very easy for us to have a theoretical discussion about immigration. True, we have problems: millions of people here illegally or semi-legally, who many of the rest of us think are draining our resources. But what would we do if our country were in Europe right now instead of being conveniently isolated by two oceans? What would we do if all these desperate people were washing up on our shores – if their boats even made it that far? Would they be a drain on our resources? Very likely – but some European countries, like Greece, don’t have any resources left to drain. We do have an easy life here!

Let’s roll back the tape a little bit. A few Arab Spring demonstrators several years ago in Syria inexplicably prompted their government to turn a mechanized army on its own people, killing hundreds of thousands. Nothing we can do about it, we said, not our problem, and the other Western powers largely agreed. Let them fight it out for themselves, we said. The country descended into total chaos, and now there is ISIS. Millions have been displaced, and not just from Syria. Did neglect come back to bite us? We haven’t really been bitten yet in this situation, just the Europeans. Some countries are still trying to say, not our problem. But the desperate thousands arrive anyway – their problem whether they like it or not.

There are no easy solutions to our own immigration issues, parochial as they may seem by comparison. Certainly, we have to come up with a fair system that allows for people living here and contributing to our economy as well as for those seeking asylum or those just seeking a better life. But as a friend of mine pointed out recently, most of our ancestors were immigrants – not always nice ones – who displaced the native population. We forced others to “migrate” here as personal property. You can keep rolling back the tape, and you’ll find that the hard distinctions between good guys and bad guys just get blurrier and blurrier.

But at some point we are going to have to set aside demagogic talk about anchor babies and fences and understand that we are all in this boat --- on this planet – together, and the hard distinctions between “our problems” and “their problems” are also a lot blurrier than they used to be.