I’ve been watching media coverage of angry Americans at our southern border waiving signs and yelling slogans, insisting that the children – most of whom are refugees of the drug war we’ve created -- “go home” to the violence and death that war has created, and I wonder who these angry Americans are. I also wonder where their parents or grandparents or other ancestors came from, and what they were fleeing from or hoped for when they landed in America. I’m not suggesting we allow in anyone who wants to come here, but these are desperate children. Whatever happened to the generosity, decency, and big-heartedness of this country? Emma Lazarus’s poem engraved in 1903 on the Statue of Liberty reads: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of our teeming shore. Send these, the homeless tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Why are we now allowing the hateful side of America to take center stage?
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