Bootstrap wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 12:58 pm
But the vast majority of people entering the border are nothing like that at all. And it really harms victims to falsely portray them that way, as some politicians are doing. They are trying to teach us how to feel, teaching us to close our hearts, teaching us to other these people. And they are doing so very successfully.
So as compassionate Christians, how should we speak about them? How should we seek to help? What is our place in all of this?
MS-13 was started in Los Angeles by Salvadoran émigrés. Of course, not all of them (or even most of) the migrants from El Salvador were MS-13 charter members - but clearly, enough were to create one of the most violent criminal gangs in the world, which eventually sent a few gangsters to migrate back to El Salvador and set up shop there as well.
What is our place in all this? If we really believe in promoting peace and nonviolence, perhaps a good place to start is to not agitate for policy positions that result in a sharp increase in violence.
Bootstrap wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 1:01 pm
There is good reason to bring up Hitler and Stalin in this kind of conversation, though.
No, there isn't. Any moral principle can be discussed without bringing up Hitler and Stalin.
I do not want to see us close our hearts and avert our eyes to kids in cages, families being forcibly separated in ways that makes it hard for them to reunite, or the horrible conditions we see in the camps where immigrants are waiting in Mexico. Under Hitler, Christians mostly turned their eyes. Even Mennonites.
When you say things like "kids in cages" and "families forcibly separated", you are simply repeating partisan talking points. We both know that kids weren't put in cages. They did have to figure out what to do with unaccompanied minors. Simply releasing them into the general American public is not a good idea, particularly with overwhelming evidence of trafficking.
Likewise, many "families forcibly separated" were no such thing at all - they were simply minors being accompanied with their traffickers. I don't think separating children from a human trafficker is a bad thing.
If the conditions of camps in Mexico are horrible, then a good solution is for the word to be spread to encourage migrants to stop going there. As I documented elsewhere, many migrants are going under the lure of false promises they saw on social media.
As Christians, compassion is a fundamental value. Caring for the last, the least, and the lost is at the heart of being Christlike. And if we sacrifice all of that because of the current political climate, we are selling our birthright for a mess of pottage.
As I documented elsewhere, I don't think a factory owner who takes out a loan for $8,000 so he can get plane tickets to Morocco and Turkey so that he can illegally enter the U.S. to seek economic opportunity is the "least of these". Part of being Christlike is not finding ways to accomodate everyone who wants to garner even more wealth - Christ's message was, in fact, the opposite.