The un-American anti-Family Asshat's Sandy Rios says refugee children
carry diseases and she be treated like lepers (never mind that we don't
even treat lepers like lepers anymore)…
Murrieta’s white folks protest the arrival of brown folks
On July 15,
The New York Times reported
that “More than 52,000 children have been caught crossing the United
States border alone since October — double last year’s number.”
Steve Stockman (r-TX) referred to this flood of refugee children as an “invasion of our nation,” He told Wing Nut Daily and its uneducated readership that “There are more people coming across the border than invaded France in World War II,”
Never mind that the allies
sent 160,000 troops
across the Channel to Normandy on D-Day alone, and by the end of June,
1944, had shipped across 875,000 men. But Stockman is a Texas repugican
so veracity is the last thing you should expect from him.
Pope Francis
says “”This
humanitarian emergency requires, as a first urgent measure, these
children be welcomed and protected.” Far from it, says Michele Bachmann,
appearing on CNN’s Crossfire. She shocked co-host Van Jones by calling immigrant children “invaders” and comparing them to rapists.
Last week, Phil
Gingrey (r-Ga.) wrote a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention with a dire warning: Some of the child refugees streaming
across the southern border into the United States might carry deadly
diseases. “Reports of illegal immigrants carrying deadly diseases such
as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis are
particularly concerning,” Gingrey wrote. “Many of the children who are
coming across the border also lack basic vaccinations such as those to
prevent chicken pox or measles.”
It’s no wonder, with rhetoric like this, that
bigoted wingnuts are gathering in their thousands to tell immigrant
children they’re not welcome in their neighborhood. They are nothing
but a bunch of little terrorists after all, future rapists, drug users,
and thieves.
Earlier this month in
Murrieta, busloads of babies in their mothers’ laps, teens, ‘tweens and
toddlers were turned back from a detainee facility.
They were met by screaming protesters waving and
wearing American flags and bearing signs that read such things as
“Return to Sender.”
They were also, to the lasting shame and embarrassment of us all, chanting “USA! USA!”
The un-American anti-Family Asshat’s Sandy Rios
says they carry diseases and she be treated like lepers (never mind that we don’t even treat lepers like lepers anymore):
I think of biblical
times, the lepers were separated — right or wrong — they were separated.
It was understood that leprosy was so contagious. So there’s nothing
wrong with wanting to separate your children. We used to quarantine
people when they had diseases.
“We’re such a healthy people that we’ve forgotten
what it’s like to be diseased and die from those diseases in huge
numbers,” she said, “but we’re going to learn, I think, again.”
And egads, these kids are transported in the “same planes that you and I fly in.”
“How do we know about lice and disease before they get on public transportation?”
We saw Arizona’s Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu
reveal in a press release the route of a bus full of 40 immigrant
children. There must be something in the water in Arizona because that’s
all it took to rally the bigots, who gathered in Oracle, Arizona, to do
their own Murrieta Intercept. We saw tea party candidate Adam Kwasman freak out
over a school bus full of – he assumed – those immigrant children. He
hurriedly tweeted, “Bus coming in. This is not compassion. This is the
abrogation of the rule of law.” It turned out instead to be a bus full
of YMCA kids.
Sheriff Paul Babeu, for his part, says letting those kids come into the country only encourages more. He took to Facebook to say, “These children should be returned to their home country — not to Oracle, Arizona, paid for by American taxpayers.”
Slow your roll, Sheriff. They’re children. They’re
not a bunch of diseased invaders looking to grow up and rape white
women. They’re children.
The tea party brought out all that is worst in wingnuttery and gave it a point of focus. They crazies then took over
the asylum and the repugican cabal is itself now in thrall to the extremists, with
the result that attacking and demonizing children has become
mainstreamed.
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!
…she could have been looking directly at these children. Instead,
Huffington Post reports that a new poll shows that,
The degree of heartlessness exhibited by Americans –
by repugicans in particular – beggars belief. Many of these children
are victims of the drug war America is funding, and refuses to end. A
drug war those same wingnuts support. But then, repugicans want
babies to be born without caring what happens to them afterward.
In the end though, you have to wonder how different
the repugican reaction would be if these were bus loads of blond-haired
and blue-eyed Northern European kids who spoke English. My guess is
they’d be volunteering their homes, and serial pedophile Ted Nugent and Duck Dynasty’s bible-totin’ Phil Robertson would probably not be alone in offering to take the 15-year-old girls into their own homes.
The wonder of travel lies equally with adventure and misadventure -
there is nothing like getting thoroughly lost in a riddling country or
culture that is not your own. But it is hard these days, with our
ultra-planned excursions, fixers and 4G service, to get properly
disoriented. Labyrinths, however, can remind us how it's done.
