Sanctuary
“Can you give me sanctuary
I must find a place to hide
a place for me to hide
Can you give me soft asylum
I can't make it any more
the man is at the door.”
Jim Morrison; The Soft Parade
Older folks here will remember that the mistreatment of immigrants seeking sanctuary is not new. We fought this battle in the 1980, against the Reagan administration. And we won. However, our constitutional democracy is, by its very nature, an on-going struggle in which the conflicts of “good versus bad” tend to arise in cycles.
Now, Reagan's election was about as disheartening as Trump's. Just as surely as the sun rises in the east, Reagan's team stole the election, with a coordinated “October surprise” involving Iran. Again, similar in nature to Trump stealing the 2016 election. And the Gipper was the extreme right-wing of the republican party, to the right of Goldwater in '64.
The Reagan administration – which still holds the record for most criminal convictions, which may even hold against the Trumpsters – was big on the US involvement in the wars in Central America. At first, the increasing Reagan administration was opposed by relatively few Democrats in the House and Senate. The citizens who vocally were against the Reagan policies were dismissed as “the usual anti-war crowd.” But things changed.
In El Salvador, for example, US-trained troops assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero, and raped and murdered four American nuns. Reports of massacres of entire villages also became more common, as the death tolls literally reached tens of thousands. When Congress did impose restrictions on the administration, the Reaganites engaged in the crimes known as the Iran-Contra scandal.
During this time, the administration attempted to stop an increasing flow of refugees seeking asylum at our southern border. Like the Trump administration today, they sought to define these people as immigrating for “economic” reasons, rather than as refugees from the terrible violence the administration was creating. Yet, in response, American citizens began defying the administration, by granting sanctuary to the families crossing the border.
More than 500 churches, for example, from a wide variety of denominations, provided safety to the human beings coming from Central America. An unknown number of other people secretly housed families. These actions were in the same spirit as the Underground Railroad, or the safe housing of Jewish families in Nazi Germany. People of conscience risked being prosecuted by the Reagan administration.
We are reaching that point today. Those opposed to the Trump administration's cruelty and lies are not limited to the “anti-Trump” people. In fact, the only ones who support the administration's policies are the “good Nazis.” The immigrants from Central America are not coming for economic reasons. They are coming to find safety from the terrible violence that is the result of American policies in their homelands for decades.
No matter if we are religious, spiritual, or atheist, it is time to join together to both protect innocent human beings, and oppose the criminals in our government. The only people who should be locked up are those in the Trump administration.
Peace,
H2O Man
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