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.
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