“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “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-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The French gifted the Statue of Liberty to the United States in June, 1885. In 1903, as invention and production continued its surge and America began what would be an era of great prosperity separated by a great war, Emma Lazarus' poem The New Colossus, from which the above is excerpted, was emblazoned on a plaque inside her.
It was a clear message that in the greatest moments of health and happiness we should never forget our roots; that we were once all immigrants, fleeing religious oppression and seeking our own opportunities. The United States inspired the world as a place where everyone had such an opportunity. Though imperfect to say the least, it would rise up as a nation among nations not just by offering freedom, but by opening its doors to those most needy and most desperate by taking them in.
Women's Suffrage hadn't arrived yet. The Civil Rights Movement hadn't happened yet. World War Two hadn't happened yet. Nagasaki and Hiroshima weren't even in the world's periphery. Vietnam, Korea, Desert Storm, and Nine-eleven hadn't happened yet.
All of these events served to wear down the American psyche it seems, with perhaps The Vietnam War becoming the first true case where the American people didn't believe in the war their government was raging. Since then, doubt has been cast repeatedly on actions taken by our armed forces overseas in the name of freedom. While never doubting the dedication of our soldiers, leadership has been called into question as to motive, timing, needs, and cost.
With the use of constant fear-mongering by the political establishment, more and more Americans have come to feel unsafe, and to feel as if our leaders are not looking out for our best interests. Recent Gallup Polls put Congress' approval at twenty percent. The President sits at forty-three percent.
Somehow, The New Colossus has faltered. And in our turn inward toward our fears, we have closed our hearts and lost the ability to reach outward.
Stories of tragedies have started to emerge from our borders. The death of six-year-old Indian immigrant Gurupreet Kaur and sixteen-year-old Carlos Georgio Hernandez Vasquez, the fifth minor from Guatemala to die in U.S. custody show just how far we have fallen.
Regardless of your take on immigration, there is no doubt we can agree in the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath that doctors take that we should "first, do no harm." The border crisis is just that, a crisis. The cause of the crisis can be argued ad nauseum by many, some of whom will deny the statistics and others who will claim just plain ignorance is part of the causation. Nevertheless, immigrants running for their lives as children should not be forced to lose theirs at our hands.
The fears of those who would decry immigrants as people looking for a handout spit in the face of our greatest treasures and most sacred values -- that human life is cherished, and the freedom to seek your own version of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness is encouraged.
Perhaps we should rewrite our textbooks and look at the Pilgrims as freeloaders instead of freedom seekers.
Certainly, Christopher Columbus, Ponce de Leon, Amerigo Vespuci -- all of these adventurers to the New World could and might easily be categorized as fortune hunters.
Fear allows for such changes in nuance and dialect. It allows people once seen as desperate immigrants to be called deadbeats and asylum seekers to be labeled terrorists.
No more under this administration's policies does our government acknowledge Lazarus, nor that beautiful lady beacon in New York Harbor, but instead categorizes groups of peoples so as to cast aspersions not only on their plight, but their character.
The country we once knew to be bold and bright, open and ultimately just, is now fearful and dim, frightful and closed. We are not the leader of the free world because to be a leader means to inspire others in the face of fear, not to cower to it.
Images such as the ones below are disturbing. Images such as the one above.... unforgivable. If we are to blame our elected officials, then we must blame ourselves. We voted and re-elected them, despite their inabilities to handle the jobs for which they were hired. This blood lies on us, our hands, no matter in which living room you sit, no matter where you lay your head, no matter how large your land.
Your American entitlement came from the blood of your forefathers, all of whom at one time or another were like these suffering people. They were the tired, the poor, the huddled masses.... and they were given by grace of our nation a safe passage, a new life in a new world.
The only way to view a closed United States, one that does this to the people seeking help, is simple: We have let them down.
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Courtesy of the Huffington Post |
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