I guess I’m the latest snowflake of society to be offended by certain spoken terms. I’m going to outline two of them this week.
The first of which is in sports when I hear fans, coaches, and players describe a bad attitude from someone in the locker room as being a ‘cancer’. A person who doesn’t get along with others is not a ‘cancer’. Cancer is a very real disease and to have it marginalized by sports people in referencing someone with character issues doesn’t sit well with me.
The other instance where I find the spoken word to be truly offensive is when people refer to something as ‘Nazi’. This term gets thrown around in the most ignorant manner imaginable. On Sunday, a totally uneducated person, who gets to teach university students at Waterloo and brainwash young minds, tweeted out that the American government’s methods with regards to curbing illegal immigration reminds him a lot of what Nazis do.
Now, I know there has been a lot of false information in the news lately surrounding what really is going on with regards to children being separated from their parents when seeking asylum and I’ll try to sift through that further down in this column, but there is not a single instance anywhere that you can show me where the American government is forcing anyone to live in inhuman conditions, torturing, or killing folks just for the heck of it. Ask a Jew who has real knowledge of Nazi treatment and then get back to me as to whether or not any of what we refer to as ‘Hitler’ or ‘Nazi’ applies. It, simply, does not. To infer it does really downplays what Jews were subjected to in the 1930s and 40s. Jewish people from the 30s and 40s would trade places with detained illegal American immigrants in a heartbeat I assure you.
There is a ton of misinformation out there when it comes to families being separated, but keep in mind there will be abuse no matter what system is implemented. Nothing is perfect. There’s always going to be a horror story.
However, if you cross the border into the United States at an official port of entry and you come with your children and have the proper documentation, nobody is separated at all.
In almost all of the cases where adults and children are split up, these are the scenarios: the child is taken if there is no way to confirm the claimed relationship between grown up and child. If the parent is a national security risk or safety risk, the child is taken away. If the parent is facing criminal charges (crossing the border illegally would qualify as a criminal offense) it may be inappropriate to keep the child in a detention facility with the parent. The child and adult are also separated if the adult is suspected of human trafficking. There are cases, because the American government has turned a blind eye to people who come across illegally with kids, where a person brings an unrelated child across the border and then is released from custody because he/she has a child on the premise he/she will appear in court at a future date. Naturally, the adult fails to show for court and is at large. The welfare of the child? Who knows. So, the American government is putting children from these situations into facilities where it’s best for the child’s well being. Approximately 80% of the children shown in the news this past week, arrived by themselves.
Now, these facilities are not akin to the Taj Mahal. Some media have called them cages. Well, I suppose when you have to provide modest bedrooms for children, you are not going to see hotels. But, these kids are well taken care of and are fed, have access to video games, television, education, and other things American and Canadian kids have access to. Don’t blame the government. Blame the adults who risk the safety of their children when they break the rules to gain entry to the United States. By the way, if the US is such a bad place to live, why are people still trying (in record numbers) to move there? To simplify it better, if you (as a Canadian or American citizen) commit a crime and go to jail, you don’t get to take your kids with you. Your kids are put in homes with other relatives or become wards of the state. The same thing happens here. The American government searches for relatives so the kids can go to a familiar setting. But, if they arrive with a stranger and the stranger is deported, it would be irresponsible to send the child home with the stranger that the youth arrived with. So, when media says the parents are deported and the kids are stuck in a government facility, that’s really not true. Is the system perfect? No, of course not. But, I come back to this very fundamental requirement that shouldn’t be difficult to follow: go to a legal port of entry and have some paperwork to prove you and your children are who you say you are and there will be no worries of being separated.
Still think this is how Nazis did things? CNN, NBC, and Canadian university professors apparently do.
Nice person mentions this week: Darren Wandy, Cole McCaig, Kathleen Vogel, Lorne Wilson, and Natalie Smith.
