The following is the expressed opinion of WTOP columnist Noah Frank. It does not necessarily reflect the attitudes or opinions of WTOP or its parent company, Hubbard Broadcasting.
I’m an American. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you are, too. And there’s a good chance that, like me, you are the descendant of immigrants, or perhaps even an immigrant yourself.
My mother was born in Minnesota, my father in Pennsylvania. Three of my four grandparents were born stateside. On some level, the English and Welsh sides of my family extend back generations in America. But there are also great grandparents who left the Ukraine for a better life, and my father’s father, who came from Greece as a 6-year-old child, accompanied only by his older siblings.
I enjoy the distinct freedom from prejudice that being a white male in America affords me. It’s not obvious to most who look at me that I am Jewish. I used to joke when I lived in Texas that I was a day-walker — I would have racist and even anti-Semitic remarks dropped in my presence without anyone being the wiser.
And although I grew up in California, where I was largely spared such publicly spewed hate, it’s a state where Japanese-American citizens were rounded up and put into camps, pulled from their homes and communities during my grandparents’ lifetimes. They were treated with much of the same lack of humanity as the European Jews during the Holocaust. There was no genocide that accompanied those camps, which is obviously an enormous divide between the two, but to be able to compare them on any level to what Hitler did to Europe in the ’30s and ’40s is a permanent scourge on America’s own human rights history.
It feels like the time for that history lesson, as “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We all probably are familiar with that quotation, but it is just the last snippet of a larger thought, one that is worth bearing out in full.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana
The absolutes in which certain presidential candidates and governors have spoken over the last few days show no awareness of what it means to be an American, nor a willingness or ability to improve upon the past. The actions of the House of Representatives Thursday only reaffirmed such fear-based, knee jerking. Santayana was himself an immigrant — born in Spain and educated at Harvard before returning to Europe — and thought of as a conservative philosopher.
The statements made this week are not conservative. They are reactionary.
The root of the word “reactionary” originates, ironically enough, in les réactionnaires, those who opposed the French Revolution in the 18th century. They were largely strict religious folks who stood in the way of France becoming everything it is today. Our own revolution shared many of the same ideals of the Enlightenment, of natural rights and equality, of freedom from tyrannical or religious rule. France remains our oldest ally for good reason.
The most reactionary group in the world today isn’t hard to find. They are the ones rejecting every form of progress, trying to drag modernity and civilization back into the 7th century to create a holy war in the Middle East. Why you would want to aid them in that objective is a somewhat separate issue for another time. But refusing those who are literally running for their lives to escape persecution, who are rejecting assimilation at the risk of their existence, is flat out un-American.
Furthermore, the only thing more un-American than restricting who we welcome to our shores by their country of origin is to filter them by their religion. We are a country founded by pilgrims escaping political and religious persecution. How could anyone holding or running for office forget this?
This isn’t just what we do. It’s fundamentally who we are.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
You know those words, because every American knows those words. They sit at the base of Lady Liberty, France’s gift to us after its revolution followed our own. We are the nation of refuge for those yearning to breathe free. We offer the chance to build a better life. And while those who have arrived in the new world first will always feel some entitled sense of superiority — from Ben Franklin condemning Germans for refusing to learn English to Canadians fearing the infiltration of the Irish — we cannot be America without that tenet.
France — the country actually attacked last week — has already pledged to welcome 30,000 Syrian refugees over the next two years.
In America, we have a comprehensive vetting system already in place that takes 18 to 24 months to vet and accept refugees, including interviews, background checks, collection of biometric data and an analysis of their past work history. And yet some are rejecting our efforts to accommodate 10,000 on our shores.
There have been zero domestic terrorism arrests from any of the nearly 750,000 Syrian refugees settled in the United States since September 11, 2001. They are just Americans, your friends, neighbors and co-workers. If they wanted to be a part of what is happening in their homeland, they would not be here in the first place.
That Santayana quotation, by the way, comes from a book called “The Birth of Reason.” It is mandatory to embrace reason in times like these, to not succumb to our base fight or flight instinct and strip away generations of experience. It is also necessary to remember the reason America is what it is, why it is the lamp that guides others out of the darkness.
To deny this is to become less American, to forsake what our forefathers and French allies fought and died for. It cheapens our very worth to the core.
Noah Frank is a sports writer and columnist for WTOP. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own and do not reflect those of WTOP or its parent company, Hubbard Broadcasting.
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