« Labor Day Weekend To-do List | Main | This entry describes my thoughts also. You should read it and be enlightened. »
September 01, 2005
Refugees in America?
My Dad was a refugee. He was born in a refugee camp in Germany in 1947, because his family fled Latvia in 1944 because the Soviets were coming to kick out the Nazis. (Who is worse, Soviets or Nazis? Flip a coin.) His sister was born on a table during an air raid. Nobody was there but Grandfather and Grandmother (of course) and the newly born Aunt. Everyone else ran to the air raid shelters. They all lived in Germany until 1951 when they finally got immigration sponsors and got on the last boat to America.
Dad was 4 when they got here to America. There were 5 of them: Grandmother, Grandfather, Dad, Aunt, and Great-Grandmother. They had the clothes on their backs and two trunks full of clothes and stuff. We still have the trunks in my parents' garage. That is all they had when they got here.
Dad was little, but he remembers being on the ship, eating a banana, sailing into the port that accepted him and his family. No, they did not have the archetypal "Look there's the Statue of Liberty let's go to Ellis Island" experience that so many immigrants had. They sailed in to the Port of New Orleans.
When I was about 9 or 10 or 11, my family took a road trip down to Florida. We drove along the Gulf Coast and took a dip south to New Orleans to see the port where Dad arrived as a four-year-old. We stood there and prayed together and thanked God for sparing Dad and his family from the terribleness of the Soviet Occupation in Latvia. Even though they had hard times as a family, they made it.
I had a friend in college who had lived in a refugee camp in Cote d'Ivoire for a while. He described some of the living conditions to me. I was horrified, of course, but in a distant way.
We are in America. This is the land of the free and the home of the brave. This is where the poor, the tired, the hungry come who yearn to be free and start new lives. This is America, and we should not have refugees here.
I just listened to a news report on NPR describing what life is like in the Superdome. The refugees are being bussed to Houston, but the Astrodome will soon be full, and then where will the refugees go? I can't imagine the kind of life the people in the Superdome are experiencing. This is America, people! For Pete's sake! How can we be living this way?
The people in New Orleans are behaving as badly as the inmates of the concentration camps were. The horror of the concentration camps came not only from the gas chambers, torture barracks, starvation, beatings, overcrowding, overwork, biological experiments, and everything we've grown up learning about, but also from the mistreatment of prisoners by each other! Instead of banding together to comfort and console one another, they turned on each other, wanting to suck the other prisoners into the same misery they were experiencing. It was as if, in some perverse way, the prisoners could expunge their own misery and suffering and regain a little bit of control over their own lives by making the others around them more miserable than they themselves were. Why are the pitiful and sad refugees of New Orleans making it so bad for the others around them, from fellow refugees to hospital workers to military/police officers? Refugees are shooting on police boats, they are attacking what few supply trucks come in, they are shooting on doctors and nurses in hospitals. What is wrong with us? Why can't we do any better than this?
Last year, I taught the play Anne Frank to my 8th grade class. I defy Anne or anyone to say, now, that "In spite of everything, people really are good at heart." She didn't see this; she lived in an attic for three years, away from degradation and sin and filthy wickedness when she wrote that statement; she didn't know.
Well, God told Adam and Eve that if they ate from the tree, they would sin. They knew evil and death and sin, and so do we. I don't want this knowledge anymore! It's too heavy. It's too terrible. It's too degrading. It's too much. It's too depraved.
Oh, Lord, Jesus Christ Son of God Savior, have mercy on us. Come, Lord Jesus. You will make all things new in the end. You are the victor. You are the Savior. You are the redeemer. You give us homes, eternal homes, homes in you. Come, Lord Jesus.
Ponderings. | By The Newest Worker | 06:30 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://chattablogs.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/25316
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Refugees in America?:
Comments
If this is not the beginning of the end times, I shudder to think what evil lies ahead. Even though I believe in total depravity, I had great faith in the goodness of Americans. We too, can reach the lowest depths of sin.
Posted by: Cindy Tucker at September 1, 2005 09:23 PM