America. Great again?

Imagine.

Tomorrow morning walk out of your house. Take your kids. Take only what you can carry.

Don’t bother to lock the door, you’re never coming back.

You’ll walk, in the sun, in the dust, more than 2,000 miles.

You know that when you arrive soldiers will be waiting to send you back.

Still, you walk. With women, children, old men…sick, lame, exhausted; carried on by a desperate hope, or by sheer desperation itself.

Imagine what could make you get up, and with no money, no food, no water, no shelter, walk to Los Angeles or Laredo, Texas.

How hungry, how scared, how desperately hopeless and hopeful would you need to be?

*******

We’re told by the president that we’re about to be invaded. That our southern border is being threatened by a horde on a relentless march to the Rio Grande and beyond. They’re coming and he is determined that they will be stopped.

And they are coming. We’ve read the reports. Seen the photos. Viewed the video. Numbering up to 7,500 they are coming – desperate women, children, and old men. Frightened, impoverished, they walked out of their homes, walked out of their villages, heading north with no more than they could carry, driven by circumstances unimaginable to us watching secure and comfortable in our homes.

So he’s sending more than 5,000 soldiers, almost as many armed, combat trained warfighters as the people they are dispatched to confront. People who have nothing. Hungry, frightened people who our president claims threaten our country with a national emergency, an “assault on our country.”

A country that faced down Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Tojo trembles in the face of footsore mothers looking to feed their children…

******

I guess living 93 years gives a guy a certain sense of perspective.

Well into his ninth decade, Dad has lived through a lot – boom and bust; a great depression and a great recession; a world war, war in Korea, war in the jungle, war in the desert and war in a bunch of other places too small to be remembered. He’s raised hogs, crops, kids and a bit of hell, and after all that, he as a pretty good sense of when to be scared and when somebody is just out to scare you.

He doesn’t think well of folks who do that.

He’d been listening to the news just before he got on the phone. He wasn’t at all happy about what he’d just heard.

“Stupid,” he said. “Just damn stupid.”

“Those people can’t do anything to hurt us.”

“Do the math,” he said.

Instead of 5,000 soldiers, send 150 bus drivers – and buses – to meet the refugees at the border.

Three buses from each state in the Union. Fifty passengers in each bus. One hundred fifty needy people going to each state.

“There are 87 counties in Minnesota,” Dad said. “That’s less than two people per county.”

“We can handle that. If we can’t, we ought to be ashamed.”

Poor people. Hungry people. People looking to work, care for their families, make better lives … if these are the people who frighten us, people whose arrival would be a “national emergency” we’re in a sorry state.

What kind of country have we become?

Dad’s generation faced down fascism and the Depression, confident they had “nothing to fear but fear itself.’

They beat the Depression, fought a war, then rebuilt the world.

This generation is told to be afraid of the world, then build a wall to keep it out.

If we truly want America to be great again, look at what American has done that made it great.

Then do those things.

Again.