Congratulations to Tommy Christopher for writing the smartest article Mediaite has run this year yet, as well for actually obliging the portal’s tagline where the majority of its content is laughably exemplified with writers doing scant else but spouting the lazy old “but look at this video/social media post!!!”. While it’s commonplace for rightwing pundits to address all issues concerning migrants, immigrants and refugees as existential threats consisting entirely of repugnant caravans acting under terroristic orders to rape and pillage no differently than our forebearers historically raped and pillaged their forebearers, Christopher observes that their centrist competitors are framing current issues of children crossing national borders through a thinly-veiled xenophobia of their own.
It is indeed maniacal to so fervently believe that every foreigner is malicious, but it is no less disconnected from reality to suggest that most migrants, immigrants and refugees, be they children or not, know any alternatives to the abject desperation of arriving here, the birthplace of sadomasochism. Theirs is the kind of desperation which privileged livelihoods simply cannot and will never grasp, but bluntly refusing to even vaguely consider the possibility that most of these children earnestly have nowhere else to go and no safe harbor to return to, says so much without actually saying anything sensible at all. The crisis is not in what the self-entitled locals must experience through the presence of these unaccompanied children, the crisis is in what led these children here to begin with. The crisis is what the children themselves have experienced and are experiencing, not the fantasies of pearl-clutching housed persons issuing floods of insinuations to turn every child away sight unseen, verifying the unironic duplicity of the fabled declaration that all persons are created equal.
Self-awareness is just not a mode of thought Americans are capable of entertaining. Despite all the mirror-gazing and black mirror-gazing and selfie obsessions, acknowledging in themselves, their words or deeds or in what passes for their convictions any contradictions whatsoever is a matter which flies universally and tragically over heads one and all. A claim unconsciously validated elsewhere by a wholly unrelated survey concluding that most Americans are programmed to give more trust to the father figure of marketing than to their own biological needs, even should it be to their own private detriment. Folding to the whims of ego is kind of where the bulk of societal ills are born.
As with the noticeable absence of purported pro-life advocates ever speaking in favor of gun-control laws anywhere, no such advocacy groups seem all that concerned with the well-being of these children. Because egos only bow to greater egos, and not to the ebb and flow of measurable reality. This culture, this national identity based altogether on the insanely prioritized appeasement of self-idolators amounts to everyone being less concerned with helping those who need help than with gratifying those who want gratification. Inconveniences to whichever personal comfort level, partisanship or corporate brand loyalty widely regarded as life-threatening, while persons whose life and livelihoods are under visceral threat, who in fact know all too well the plethora of differences between mere inconvenience and viable, physical threat, are themselves demeaned and disregarded as inconveniences. This is made abundantly clear with the millions of domestic refugees comprising America’s native homeless, who are provided generously with ample reasons night and day for disaffection toward society at large. Regardless of political mandates or religious dogmatics or corporate initiatives no life is accepted as equal by subjective standards but those one wishes to befriend, to fuck or to vicariously be.
Likewise and of dramatically equal hypocrisy do pro-choice fanatics with paid platforms appear to be further suggesting that some life is more important than other life, by evidently giving more consideration to barring access for so many helpless victims to civil and basic human rights constitutionally requisitioned of all, by all and for all, than to the likelihood that most are likely not junkies or terrorists or perverts or any other variety of inappropriateness. The notion that those without resources for unseemliness might somehow be more unseemly than a population living and dying vaingloriously by the duplicitous nature of peer pressures and public relations, is so American. The small fact that any sort of aid might require effort of any measure is not unto itself a logical or ethical reason to block assistance, rather, it’s all the more reason to help. Containment spells are designed to safeguard the ego and protection spells are constructed to safeguard the ego, but this current discourse is nothing more than an argument of sociopolitical equivalencies over which side of the divide safeguards the right egos. When every ego can go get tossed. Obstructing or outright endangering the life, liberty or pursuits of happiness for anyone is not at all what a democracy should be about, even if it’s forever the status quo for persons sheltered enough to think that freedom is by any means a finite resource at risk of depletion.