Refugee Children and the Hunger Games

I tried to read The Hunger Games trilogy once.  The writing more than passes muster, but I couldn’t finish the books.   I could not accept its major premise.  I could not envision a society so corrupt and totalitarian that it would entertain the masses by pitting its children in televised combats to the death.  But I have started to connect some very uncomfortable dots.  Think of how we devalue children and truncate childhood.  Think of how transient adult pleasure is valued over the demands of child rearing.   The signs of possible dystopia are all around us.  Are we paying attention to them?

That brings us to a very real, present time crisis, and our reaction to it.  We currently have some 54,000 unaccompanied minors—children—crowded into holding cells designed to hold drug moving scum, human traffickers and gang/cartel goons.  These kids are truly orphans of the storm, and my heart goes out to them.  How any could mother, any Christian, any American look at them and not be moved? 

These children traveled through Mexico, but most are not Mexican.  Most come from corrupt, dysfunctional, violence ravaged banana republics in Central America.  Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are the primary countries of origin.  The alarming numbers of children, crossing alone, was first noted two years ago.  Children crossing the border from each country named, doubled in 2012.  Our border patrol and local elected officials alerted Washington to the problem at that time.  They were ignored.  The numbers doubled again—close to 8,000 from each country—in 2013.  Requests for action were ignored.  By the summer of 2014 the totals per country doubled again, reaching almost 16,000 children per hell hole!  Now the press decided it was news worthy, so Washington suddenly discovered the Rio Grande Valley!  The sight of children sleeping, head to foot, on concrete slaps, covered by Red Cross blankets finally reached the media’s threshold of photo worthy. 

            Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am disappointed in the extreme with this ineffectual, jejune, shallow President.  I don’t have much regard for our do-nothing Congress either and right now I am angry and embarrassed by the members of my own party who barred busses of children from entering a shelter in California.  Shame, shame, shame on those, “concerned citizens.”  You aren’t “concerned,” you are a bullying mob! 

            These children are refugees, not illegal aliens (a group I have no sympathy with).  You need only do a little research into what their lives are like in Central America to know that they are fleeing the kind of violence that only anarchy can produce.  We need to welcome these children, refuse to send them home, turn them into the Americans they want to be.  We need to deduct $100,000 per child from the foreign aid we send to their countries of origin.  That money needs to be sent to the schools in whatever area they eventually locate.   We need to close the borders, fine Mexico $100,000 per child for allowing free transit of these minors through its land, and we need to make human trafficking a capital offense.  What we do NOT need to do, is vent our anger and frustration with illegal aliens on these poor children. 

            I can not say it any better than Emma Lazarus did in her poem, “The New Colossus.”

“…Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

            Keep the faith with these children.