Soap Box

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I don't blame anybody for wanting to come to America and do believe that our immigration policy needs some serious overhauling; but until it is, if we don't follow the one currently in place, the potential for chaos is extreme.

A few nights ago, I was watching a political TV panel discussing the influx of children across our southern border and how the situation should be handled. Opinions of the talking heads ranged from the practical to the impractical, from deportation to assimilation, from the acquisition of thousands of productive new citizens to dire predictions of the expense of caring for the ones who are already here and the catastrophic results of tens of thousands more who will come in the future.

As usual the conservatives leaned toward pragmatism while the liberals expounded their usual idealistic compassion about how America should take in any child who showed up on our doorstep seeking asylum from violence and oppression and insinuating that anybody who felt differently hated children and wanted to put them on boxcars and send them back from whence they came.

Which brings us right back to where we started, what do we do about the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children coming across our borders, and even more importantly, what are we going to do about the hundreds of thousands more who will be coming across in the months to come?

The liberal mindset that we should take them all in, feed and clothe them, educate them and assimilate them into society is compassionate and well meaning, but as most idealistic remedies, is long on compassion and short on practicality and answers.

And no, everybody who disagrees with them is not calloused and cruel, does not hate children and has no desire to see any child suffer, and no American will stand by and watch a child be mistreated, but there are intrinsic and far reaching problems attached to this situation, whichever way we eventually decide to deal with it.

We are not dealing with just a group of refugee children, they all have families, many of which are still in Guatemala, El Salvador or wherever their countries of origin and when you consider that they will almost certainly be coming to join their children in America it exponentially increases the numbers to the point, should this process continue the numbers of dependents added to the entitlement rolls could run into the millions which translates into billions and then trillions of dollars and adds to the already bloated pool of unskilled workers living in this country.

You have heard it said that America cannot be the police force for the world - and at the same time - neither can it be the orphanage. Our resources are stretched to the breaking point and will not cover an ever-increasing flood of people of any age, children notwithstanding.

Then look at the practical side of things.

Our border patrol agents can no longer patrol the border; they're too busy changing diapers, making up baby formula and finding food and some kind of lodging for the thousands of helpless children who have suddenly been thrust into their care.

How can we possibly know what diseases could be coming across our border?

How can we know that some of the very element of violent gangs and cartels these children are purportedly running away from is not coming across the border with them, the dangerous answer is, we don't.

Where does it stop? Will we allow this to go on and on until it turns into the straw that breaks the camels back? And a very fragile back it is.

What will President Obama do about it?

My guess is next to nothing. Probably just a whole lot of rhetoric about the wonderful compassion of the nation he was going around the world blasting for it's mistakes a few years ago, and how it is incumbent on American "exceptionalism" to take in the needy of the world.

This is truly a conundrum of gigantic proportions, one that should have been foreseen and dealt with before it ever reached the catastrophic proportions it has become, tearing the nation between conscious and practicality, fairness and foolishness, what's right and what's wrong.

It's called leadership�and oh, that we had some.

What do you think?

Pray for our troops and the peace of Jerusalem.

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels