• Anchor Babies  American Children

  12/12/11

  Mike J. Quinn- Author

  southoftheborderbook.com/wordpress

   

  To Fox News and Bob Dane, spokesman for F.A.I.R.

   

  There are few terms that engender more anger than racial ones. When spoken aloud, they fan the flames of the already bitter, disparage the character of whom they are directed towards, and enrage those who listen and do not approve. When spoken to one’s self, they are like cancer to the soul. When adults say them about children, it is  utterly without honor or defense.

   

  Bigots are people with a chronic personality disorder. They do not like something about a class of people that is different from them. Like alcoholics, they seek out each other’s company so they can feel normal while indulging themselves in their particular brand of self-destructive behavior.  They rationalize that if other people feel the same way, then they must be right.

   

  People who use the term Anchor Babies are no different. The term serves a distorted purpose for those who use it, and a dictionary was going to add credibility to the term by adding it to their list of new phrases. Unfortunately the widespread use of the term this past year hinted at it’s legitimacy, but when inspected more closely, a dark morality emerges.

   

  When using this term, people are de-humanizing young, innocent children and categorizing them as an undesirable object, much in the same way other races have been subjected to. With Anchor Babies, it is children we are picking on. How insensitive can we as human beings become? Much more, I’m afraid.

   

  The term came about when ignorant and hateful people tried to claim that parents of children born in the United States are using their children to gain access to citizenship for them and the rest of their family. The problem is there is not a single fact to back that assumption up, but there are hundreds of thousands of parents who have been deported while their children stayed behind. And it gets worse.

   

  According to a recent study done by the Applied Research Center there are over five thousand examples of American citizen children being put in foster care after deporting their parents. Now I ask you, is there anything more de-humanizing than to distribute children like so much junk left behind after someone has suddenly left the country?

   

  Luckily few of us ever have to experience the tragedy of separating a child from their parents first-hand. We all benefit from the perspective of distance. The lack of pictures and sound makes it all seem like it never really happened, while reducing the children to mere statistics on a piece of paper to be filed under Miscellaneous. The hate-mongers meanwhile are free to pick on children all they like.

   

  Our legal system seems to be able to clean up a mess just as quickly as it’s made,and once you deport the parents, the children don’t speak up for themselves, so few people will ever hear about it.

   

  These children are not anchors, and they are not furniture or cars or used clothing —they are children— American children. They are citizens of this country and because of their age they need to be treated with more care than an adult. They don’t understand how things work or what their options are, or even how to take care of their own basic necessities. These innocent children rely on adults to do that for them, and we are sadly letting them down in the most egregious way possible. Sure we are taking care of their immediate physical needs, and so it may appear on the outside that we are taking great care of them, but can we see inside their hearts and minds to measure and catalogue the emotional damage we have inflicted upon them when we crushed their worlds and cast them into a new and completely foreign one? Have we as a nation lost the ability to empathize with children? Have we completely forgotten that to a child, a family unit is their world?

   

  Many people will tell you that their whole lives changed when their parents got divorced, and they only left one parent behind– and even then there was visitation. Can you then imagine what it would have been like to have nothing of your old life to cling to for comfort and security when all the world stopped making sense?

   

  So remember, Bob Dane, and Fox News Inc. the next time you go to use this phrase, or hear someone else say it, that these are not things, they are children– American children, who got their citizenship the same way you and I did. Let us not emotionally devastate them, especially in the name of Law or Country, for there can never be a right way– or an American way– to abuse a child.

   

  We should stop this behavior immediately on the grounds of it being cruel and inhumane punishment. We need to figure out a less harmful way to do things.  If we think ourselves to be a great nation, then we should damn well be able to do much better than this.

   

   

   

  For the entire report by the Applied Research center see  http://bit.ly/vdPhQr

So, another day, and another immigration story. Today many families are leaving Alabama for Arkansas or back to Mexico due to a strict immigration bill being signed into law there. As usual, below in the comments was another story. Reading about a hundred of the almost three thousand comments I am struck by a couple of things:

1)  An overwhelming majority of comments are sympathetic to the law and approve the direction it is going in.

2)  The comments also reflect the voice of hate, and overwhelmingly drown out the few rational arguments crying out for the repair of a broken system.

3)  They are overwhelmingly selfish and self-righteous.

4)  Few of them even consider themselves to have ever come from the same situation, and the few who do acknowledge the similarities in their heritage but use “Might is Right” as their justification.

So, why are the overwhelming majority of these posters hateful and bigoted?

Where is the rational voice of a compassionate nation struggling with a difficult issue?

Where is America, the country that fights for other countries rights to be governed by it’s people (all it’s people) and be governed by a democratic process?

It appears that either the majority actually is speaking and America is not the righteous defender of the people of the free world, or there is a silent majority sitting on the sidelines.

But why would that be?

Don’t they realize that these comments are what lots of people the world over look towards to find how the people view something? If there is a majority sitting this debate out, then they are in fact being spoken for as far as the world see it, whether they like it or not.

Bombs are pretty loud, and they spoke for us in Iraq, when we overthrew an unstable dictator who killed all voices of opposition and supposedly harbored weapons of mass destruction. A large vocal majority approved that at the time.  Are these the same voices in the comments below the story today?

Granted, posting a comment in opposition of the majority in these arguments is often as profitable as spitting into the wind, but that doesn’t explain why the voice of reason isn’t the majority.

Where is the logical debate about the issues without the racial name calling and hate mongering that we as a nation are now viewed as being. This is making us look quite hypocritical.

We will fight and spend billions of dollars to defend another nations rights to live free and self-govern, yet we are denying a minority their rights as human beings ourselves. Remember the Kurds of Iraq, who were being killed by their nations leader because they were viewed as a worthless minority? We established a safe haven for them in their country, but we are refusing a discriminated minority safe haven in our own back yard.

Such hypocrisy does not make it easy for us to justify making other countries abide by our morals of  right and wrong, when we ourselves cannot live by them. This does not sit well with the world community.

How would you feel if another country saw what we were doing to our latin population and invaded us to protect them and create a safe haven for them? Yep, we’d shout and protest and disrupt them as much as possible, not trusting anything they said and counting the minutes until they went home.

Sound familiar?

We need to wake up and realize we are not the world’s morality protectors and underdog defenders that we think we are.

Those who live in glass houses should not carry around a pocket full of rocks.

Then what would we do? Stop forcing others to live like we ourselves wished we lived, or will the silent and strong stand up and try to take back which the loud and the oppressive are taking from us every day we do not defend what is right.

This is exactly what Edmund Burke once said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

So America, the voice of hate is the loudest today. There are more racial slurs and hateful innuendos in the comments below the immigration stories than anything else. Is this the voice of the majority? Is this who you want the world to see us as being?

We need to debate this issue in order to come up with logical and workable solutions to our problems that we as a country can live by. But we need to keep the hate out, or  it will consume us.

The whole world is free to look at the comments below the news articles to see what the people themselves think of  any article. This is what they’re reading.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/05/us/immigration-one-family/index.html

Is this representative of you? If it isn’t and you do nothing, then it for all intents and purposes, it really is.