Among the women, often with children, who have become encamped at our Mexican border, it is reported that many are being raped. It is not a minor issue. It is a major danger for these women stuck in Tijuana.
Who do we hold responsible for this? The Mexican government? The American government? Trump? The rapists themselves? Tijuana is famous as a dangerous place. Despite American laws offering asylum to endangered refugees, we have used our army to keep them out of the United States.
Worldwide, due to either wars or drug wars, refugees are seeking help. In most western European nations, many central and south American countries, and in the United States we who claim religious compassion for others are ignoring our contribution to the conditions that have created the situations the refugees find themselves in.
While we obsess about our finances, our mortgages, the cost of our elegant cars, our clothes, our next vacation, several million people planetwide are homeless and often being relentlessly abused by insensitive and violent people.
In Yemen, daily, scores of small children are dying of starvation in a war where we have supplied much, if not most, of the weapons to the fighting forces, bringing millions of dollars of profits to our defense industry.
What can one say about a culture such as ours, with our 800 military bases worldwide, defending us against many peoples of the world who consider us much the same as history’s famous Roman Empire?
The comparison is not, of course, entirely accurate But the millions, billions, trillions of dollars that have been earned by U.S. defense manufacturing can not be honestly factored out of the international conditions producing such tangibly horrid results.
Does our government spend any money and energy trying to assemble the so-called civilized nations of the world to discuss how to reverse their war machinery? Do the manufacturers earning the profits lobby for such an effort?
Everyone has become so complicit in the basic industry of America that we consider any resistance to the military mildly treasonous. Meanwhile, viewed objectively, one cannot rationally justify a culture that essentially bases its economy on perpetual defense spending.
The violence, the indignity, the pain and suffering forced onto millions of refugees, whom we often identify as outlaws and criminals, is indescribable. While many endlessly promote the world’s predominant economic capitalist culture, the worldwide consequence of it in battle with Jihadist fanatics has continued to wreck havoc over the planet.
Is there an easy answer? Is there an answer at all? Must it simply be that these millions must die, victims some could say, of world society’s minimal evolution? With a corporate capitalistic culture hypnotized by the sole motivation of financial profit, what can we otherwise expect?
A worldwide culture that takes no responsibility for trying to end the brutal political practice of war, for declining even to discuss among themselves how to attempt to drive its solution into existence – what can one say about it?
Is it simply not going to end? Is it simply going to continue to be permitted? These worldwide refugees are becoming a congenital presence in the midst of the financial wealth of the corporate entities profiting from its existence. It is becoming an acceptable habit.
Do we have no other means of dealing with this than to ignore it on the way to our latest meal in the newest restaurant in town? Is this all our culture allows us to do? Is this all each and every one of us knows about how to conduct ourselves in our individual lives?
I don’t know the answer. I know only that our culture and its political and religious beliefs are incapable of coping with the situation. It is a defining question of our time. It is a defining question of our very existence on this planet. It is a defining question about the value of each and every one of us.
