...Your Huddled Masses Yearning To Breathe Free

Somebody pictured it best over the weekend: a picture of Trump holding up the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty.

I want to congratulate all those who spontaneously showed up to protest his "Muslim Ban" at airports and on the streets around the country. Yes, I know his mouthpieces claim that's not what it is, but we know the truth. Every country he picked is predominately Muslim, though he claims that's not why in the same breath he bemoans the terrible treatment Christians have gotten in those countries. Maybe by now even those who self-righteously claim "I don't pay attention to politics"have figured out he's a habitual liar.

Actually, he's worse than just that. To start with, his ban is ineffectual for what he claims it's for. Look at the acts of terrorism in this country. Anybody remember Timothy McVay? Home grown. Christian. Citizen. White. Aimed his truck bomb to kill government workers, visitors, and a preschool. That's not terrorism? Whom would you ban to have stopped that?

Columbine. Aurora. Sandy Hook. If you think they're not terrorism, you're just not thinking. Whom would you have banned entry to, to stop those and all the similar events in the last few years?

So Trump picks out a few predominately Muslim countries to ban entry from. Effective? What terrorists have actually come from them? If you take 9/11, for example, everybody's fall-back excuse for doing awful things, those perpetrators predominately came from Saudi Arabia. Why not ban folks from there? Oh wait, Trump does business there. And in the rest of the countries just as predominantly Muslim from the same areas as the "chosen" ones.

Pretty well thought out, eh?

Workable? This is exactly the kind of action that aids in recruitment for ISIS. Our hate in the face of unreasoned fear is the exact thing that they use to draw in new followers by the multitudes. Perhaps that is what he really wants. There's a lot of money to be gotten in arming for and conducting a war. Nevermind the cost in people.

Let's pretend that his orders made some kind of sense, that they aren't unconstitutional as several federal judges have already ruled they are, and that we're not already in some kind of constitutional crisis. Look at whom we've caught in the net of "terrorists". Grandmothers. Small children, many already U.S. citizens. Doctors. Engineers. Translators who risked their lives for us. Green card holders, already having gone through "extreme vetting".

Hey, good job, eh?

This is a nation of immigrants and their descendants. We, or our ancestors, arrived here from somewhere else, however many years, centuries, millenia ago. Some were forced to come, either as slaves, or indentured for criminal acts. The rest arrived in hopes of a better future than was possible for them and their children where they had come from. Freedom of/from religion. Justice. Ownership of land. Food. Economic possibilities. Hope.

My ancestors came that way. So did yours. The next wave is arriving now, and another will follow. Each will be different, and we who are already here will resist, adjust, and finally accept this is who we are. Or, like Trump's followers, seeing only the losses, never the gains, believe they can draw a line in the sand and keep the tide from washing it away.

It's more than just another hunk of copper:  "Give me your tired, your poor,  your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Or are we just going to bomb that first?