Peter Pan
I have a personal policy of avoiding main stream corporate news outlets like I avoid The Weather Channel. I don’t need to know about hurricane Gertrude from the minute it forms off the coast of Africa. It might be weeks before it crosses the Atlantic and actually becomes a problem. When it gets close, IF it gets close, then I will hear about it at Five Brothers over café con leche. That way I avoid those weeks of needless anxiety and nail biting. The same goes for watching, listening and/or reading corporate sponsored propaganda, aka the news.
An example of this was my experience at a party the other night. A nice woman was extremely agitated that our sovereign nation was being invaded by “hordes” of children from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico. She asked me if I wasn’t extremely agitated, as well. I told her that it was the first I’d heard of it. (You see? It works! I managed to avoid, at least for a few days, the angst produced by this threat from south of the border of an invasion of little kids and some of their mommies!) I then said I would look into it and get back to her. Actually, I borrowed somebody’s tablet at the party and googled “kids immigrating to the US” and up came the story.
Simply put, the children come from drug gang infested, dangerous, and chaotic environments and mothers fearing for their children’s lives have sent their kids here in hopes that they can find refuge. I remember when our government/CIA started the rumor after Cuba’s revolution that Castro was going to take children from their parents and send them to Russia, so the Pedro Pan exodus of 14,000 Cuban children to Miami was created. From 1961 to 1964 these children were welcomed and given homes with friends and relatives and kind strangers all over the US.
That goodwill we had in the sixties has vanished and been replaced with hatred, vitriol and paranoia by the mean spirited and ignorant. Ignorance is defined as lacking knowledge or information. Do these people that are attacking busses filled with frightened children have an inkling of what they are doing? These children are fleeing a real threat to their lives, not a rumor. Have we completely lost our humanity and compassion? These are children, for God’s sake.
A little research and one finds out that back in 2008, in the sunset of George W. Bush’s reign, he signed a bi-partisan bill into law that allows children to come into the country and be protected from human trafficking and other predatory and dangerous threats. Instead of being turned away at the border the law requires the children be given an opportunity to appear at an immigration hearing and consult with an advocate and receive access to counsel. It also requires they be turned over to The Department of Health and Human Services and placed “in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child.”
Would that that same passionate anger was directed at the causes of the refugee… Our own insatiable demand for illegal drugs in the US creates the environment of dangerous chaos in the countries these children come from and they are no longer safe to go to school or even play outside. Parents do what they must for their kids. That is a fact.
Back at the party the conversation on brown kids invading quickly deteriorated to a hate fest of brown people in general. My old favorite came up quickly, “They’re taking our jobs away!” OMGWTF?! PLEASE! I asked my friends, if they wanted to pick tomatoes in California in the blazing sun for less than minimum wage and live in farm camps and be treated like slaves? Is that the job they really want and resent South Americans taking away from them? Or perhaps they would like to wash dishes fourteen hours a day for less than minimum wage with no overtime or benefits and share a room with five other guys so they can save a little money to send back home.
Another fave is, “They get free medical attention!” So do the approximately 2.3 million people incarcerated in our US prisons, 2.3 million civilian federal employees, 11.4 million military personnel and don’t forget our do-nothing congress. Instead of begrudging people healthcare why not pitch a fit that the rest of us hardworking Americans DON’T have free medical? When we talk of “porous borders”, we could just as well be talking about the billions of tax dollars exiting our borders. If US corporations were really people like us, as they claim, they would have to pay their fair share of taxes they owe instead of taking it over the border and hiding it. If that was the case free or reduced medical care would just be the beginning.
So, maybe we’re getting all pissed off at the wrong people. Little kids and their mommies are not the problem. Corporate dead-beats, Drug Cartels in cahoots with Too-Big-To-Fail money launderers and ignorance are what we should be focusing on. So turn off the fabulists selling the latest self-righteous anger on TV and radio and take a step back and look at the big picture. Ignorance is far from bliss.
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Alex Symington
Alex lives with his wife, Anna in Key West, Florida. He enjoys writing poetry and prose and making the complacent uncomfortable.
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More on this subject from other sources:
We should all be more Peter Pan, and fly by the Statue of Liberty and read Emma’s engraved words.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Peter_Pan
“With the help of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Miami and Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh, some children were placed with relatives, friends, foster care or group homes in 35 states.[2]”
I shudder to think what could have happened to those not included in the “some”. Or even those that were included in the “some” that ended up in foster/group homes. They might have fared better in Russia.
Ending prohibition is the solution to this mayhem.
Sister: I am one of those included in the “some” who ended up un the care of the Catholic Welfare Bureau and I can assure you that I fared very well indeed, much better than if I had been sent to Russia, Czechoslovakia, or Red China, as was the case with a cousin of mine who was forced by the Cuban government to go to Red China for ideological training. Rather than imagining things that make you shudder, why don’t you go to the source and read our stories in either https://www.facebook.com/OPPGI or http://www.miamiherald.com/cgi-bin/pedropan/index
Best regards, José.
Mr. Symington, your claim that the CIA was behind Operation Pedro Pan is not only baseless but has been repeatedly disproven. Here’s factual evidence:
On March 12, 1999, the United States District Court, N.D. Illinois, Eastern Division. ruled in the case TORRES v. C.I.A. No. 98 C 149, 39 F.Supp.2d 960 (1999) , Maria de los Angeles TORRES, Plaintiff, v. CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, Defendants, in which plaintiff alleged the CIA was responsible for the evacuation of over 14,000 Cuban children from Cuba to the United States:
“What has obviously occurred here is that Torres, who had already derived considerable information from other sources regarding the subject of her proposed book, decided that the circumstances — the existence of an operation that took place in
[39 F.Supp.2d 963]
Castro’s Cuba during the early 1960s (the very period of tensions that in part spawned the Bay of Pigs invasion), coupled with CIA’s general reputation as our hush-hush agency in charge of running covert activities in foreign countries — pointed to CIA as the likely mother lode on the subject. That may have been a reasonable guess, but because the facts have turned out to the contrary — because the evacuation of Cuban children turned out not to be a CIA operation at all4 — Torres can derive no comfort (or more importantly for present purposes, can derive no legal mileage) from her unsupported, to say nothing of unproved, speculation that CIA’s files should have been chock full of relevant documents (see In re Wade, 969 F.2d 241, 249 n. 11 (7th Cir.1992)).”
Source: http://www.leagle.com/decision/199999939FSupp2d960_1906
Now, please, you introduce factual evidence rather than repeat hearsay. Best regards, José.
I admit that I do not know much about Operation Peter Pan but you must admit that the Catholic Church has had more than its fair share of scandals. Here’s some documentation and reports on worldwide abuses committed by this organization. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiDFKCpLviw8dHJnczI2NG1TdkpIMnQxLTZpVFZxMVE&hl=en_US#gid=0
I did read some of the stories at the Miami Herald and found the one about a 17 day old baby being shipped off from Cuba to the US to be quite alarming. How can any caring parent justify such an action?