So, I woke up tonight to news that our political bedwetters have decided to do everything they can to (i) scare Americans about the Syrian refugees fleeing ISIS, and (ii) try to block the White House from doing anything to help those refugees. At last count, about 25 governors have announced that they will not allow any refugees into their states - despite the fact the governors have no such power and, in fact, any such exercise would be unconstitutional -- and there is a bill in the House that purports to strip funding from being used in any way to deal with the crisis. My own representative, Walter Jones, is one of the congressmen promoting this bill.
Sigh.
The truly sad thing about all this is that it is so, so, familiar. Americans like to tell themselves that they are brave in the face of danger and compassionate in the face of suffering. We tell this story so often that many of us believe it about ourselves - even though there is very, very little evidence that it is in any way true.
Of course, those people who are arguing that America should do everything possible to keep Syrian refugees from coming to our country presumably would tell you that this is due to the "special nature" of the problem. I mean, refusing to take in a large number of Muslim refugees can be justified because, y'know, they're Muslim - one or two just might be fake refugees, terrorists trying to get into the States so they can do terrible things. (This does not appear to have happened in France, by the way. So far, every one of the terrorists that have been identified have turned out to be EU citizens; the one "Syrian passport" that has gotten people peeing themselves in fear turned out to be a forgery.)
But surely, the bedwetters would argue, this situation really is different; I mean, it's not as if we are being asked to take in Jewish children fleeing Hitler.
Yeah, um, no. No, it's not different at all. Check out this DailyKos post, which starts off citing a survey taken in 1939 in which Americans were specifically asked whether we should open our doors to 10,000 Jewish children fleeing Hitler's Germany; 61% of us good and noble Americans, the people about whom we say today "they were the greatest generation," said No.
See, my problem is that I actually believe the story we tell ourselves about America. Oh, sure . . . I know that we very often do not behave the way we are supposed to, but I still believe in an America in which we can choose to be the people we are supposed to be. And I believe in both parts of our story. I believe that we can react with compassion when people need our help, and I believe that - even if that reaction might mean that we have to accept a little extra risk - we can be brave enough to accept that risk if that is what it takes to do the right thing.
America itself often - almost always, in fact - lets me down, but I still believe in the idea of America that we tell ourselves.
And, yeah, this is also why I pay attention to politics: because elections have consequences, and it really does matter who we elect to be our leaders. And I gotta tell you . . . it is for moments like the one featured in the video you can find at the link below, when Obama explains at the G20 Conference what our response to the Syrian refugee crisis is supposed to be . . . then I am very, very glad that he is the guy sitting in the White House.
Politics is the ongoing story we tell ourselves about who we are; I recognize the story that President Obama is telling.
Watch him tell that story here: www.youtube.com/...