Who Are We?

​Who are we?  

It's a fair question, one we can't ask too many times.  
The answer will change over time, but are we a welcoming country that believes in compassion, the rule of law, and in keeping our word?  

Are we all on our own with each country a gated, exclusive community, or do we have a moral responsibility to look out for each other?  Are we our brother's keepers?
Should we give until it hurts or not give at all?  Do we owe anyone anything?   Are those who once helped us just suckers?  Is there nothing more to human existence than carving out a little plot of dirt for yourself and your family then spending the rest of your life trying to keep everyone else off it?  

​I ask these questions because my government did something this weekend that I only read about in history books, conjuring up shameful chapters of our dusty past, ships turned away, some American citizens not really citizens at all, some rounded up and put into camps, sent away, their property redistributed among neighbors who looked more European, less… suspicious.  

Any door to sanctuary in the US has been indefinitely slammed in the face of desperate Syrians fleeing a horrific civil war with no end in sight.  

Those from Iraq, a country we invaded and whose citizens risked their lives to help us, cannot now find refuge in this country.  

An Iraqi translator who worked with the 101st Airborne division during the early years of our invasion of his country was illegally held, his valid visa he took 2 years to obtain not recognized until a lawyer was able to successfully get a judge to order his release.   This is shameful and cowardly behavior.  The poor man had received death threats, 2 of his colleagues had been murdered at work, and his wife and 3 children were already settled in Texas.  

A family of 6 - Christians, by the way, not that that should make any difference (by law, it can't) - were turned away to be sent back, separated from the greeting family and any possibility of contacting an attorney (an equal protection Fifth Amendment violation, not to mention country of origin discrimination which is prohibited).  

Most Americans have no idea how incredibly difficult our immigration procedures are.  They can't really be blamed with the oval office occupant blathering on as though no vetting existed, as if we "have no idea who these people are."  
These people.  

Our airports are some of the hardest to fly into and out of.  We're just not a very welcoming place and it's not because Europe hasn't had its share of terrorism.  I always dreaded flying back here from Europe, where passport checkpoints (if there were any at all) were a breeze.  They simply aren't as hysterical or mean-spirited or scared or whatever as we are (and they have much more experience rapidly and humanely processing people from many countries who speak many different languages with cultural sensitivity).  

Trump claims falsely that we exclude Christians at the expense of Muslims, that our immigration policy ignores some victims of persecution and genocide while favoring others (and that he, with his extensive knowledge of history, geography, and anthropology, can correct this injustice by barring over 200 million people from 7 arbitrarily-selected countries from entering the United States, even if they were issued valid visas, even if they are permanent legal residents).  

There are many victims of genocide around the world to whom we are oblivious.   I remember when the Reagan Administration sent special envoy Donald Rumsfeld on December 20, 1983 to meet with our ally at the time in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein, to pass on the message that a victory for Hussein against the Iranians (whom we were also arming in violation of United States law, as we now know) would be considered a victory for the West.  A million people died in that war.  

More importantly, Rumsfeld didn't raise any of the concerns some western powers had about Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons - the only reliable antidote to human wave attacks for the losing Iraqi army.  

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This was to have fatal consequences when a few years later on March 16, 1988, he pounded the Kurdish town of Halabja in northern Iraq with mustard gas and the deadly nerve agent sarin.   About 5,000 were killed then - mostly women and children - and another 12,000 died over the subsequent days and weeks.  

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Saddam Hussein followed up these attacks with a brutal counterinsurgency campaign, called the Anfal, against its rebellious Kurds.  An estimated 100,000 Kurds were killed.  

The United States, aware that the Iraqis had carried out the attack, as we now know, initially obfuscated, blaming Iran, then dragging their feet at the UNSC, getting a watered-down resolution condemning "continued use of chemical weapons in the conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iraq" and asking "both sides [!] to refrain from the future use of chemical weapons."  

And of course we can look at massacres we carried out, such as at My Lai or against the indigenous people of this country, or the hundreds of thousands we killed in our invasion of Iraq and the hundreds of thousands killed from the secondary collapse of infrastructure and order in Iraq and neighboring Syria.  

​My Lai.  No one went to prison for this, by the way.

We can review the manifest of the S.S. St. Louis, turned away from Cuba and the United States despite direct appeals to FDR to lift the strict quotas - since outlawed - against Jewish refugees seeking sanctuary in the United States.  Of the 900 turned away, 254 were killed by the Nazis, many in Auschwitz.  

5-year-old Michael Fink, a Jewish refugee on board the SS St. Louis, was turned back by the United States.  He survived but his mother was killed at Auschwitz.  

If we really want to stop genocide and help refugees, it makes no sense whatsoever to de-fund the UN or NATO, whose forces eventually stopped the genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, respectively, and whose UNHCR resettlement camps decrease the urge to make the dangerous, potentially destabilizing Mediterranean crossing into Europe and beyond.  

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We have accepted only a trickle of refugees compared to Europe but have far more space for resettlement and a stronger economy at the moment (that can absorb more immigrants).

Our vetting process is extremely rigorous and by invitation only.  

We can and should do better for all victims of ongoing genocide and all victims of war.

And at the very least we should not ally ourselves with brutal regimes that are perpetuating genocide or massacres, such as the Assad/Putin regime, or start tragically unnecessary wars in a region, plunging them into decades of bloodshed, instability, and the rise of extremists to fill the vacuum.  

I think instead of shaming ourselves with what we didn't do in the past about events we are powerless to change now, we should dedicate ourselves going forward to learn from those events and not be such cowards.   

If we are going to learn from the past, we should recognize that we made our worst decisions when afraid, and our fears were almost always ridiculously overblown and politicized at the time.  We should mistrust that impulse to exclude Others who don't look like us or believe differently than we do about some things.  Diversity is a wonderful thing.   Every study shows that receiving countries benefit economically from accepting immigrants.  

So even though history seems to indicate otherwise, we are better than this.  Our future must be better than the worst moments of our past.   Hand-wringing guilt and self-flagellation gets us nowhere.  

If it's helpful to remember, there isn't really a We and a They.  We are all the same species with the most trivial of differences.  And every American today is descended from an ancestor who arrived here as an immigrant, mostly in the past few centuries, a few earlier when the first peoples crossed the Bering Strait from Asia into the Americas.  

We are all each other's cousins.  We were all once persecuted and persecutor, pursuer and refugee.  

When we turn away Syrians or Iraqis or Iranians, we turn away family.

Let's be compassionate and kind to our family.

Because we are our brother's keeper.