Let My People Go!

 Call me a racist if you want to, but I'm more concerned about the war in Ukraine than I am about the myriad conflicts in Central America and the Middle East.  To be fair, ask any of the refugees from those two regions if they care as much about Ukraine as they do about the troubles in their own homelands.  My guess is they don't, and for good reason.  Okay, Slavic Europe is not exactly my homeland, but it is the homeland of my ancestors.  All four of my grandparents came from Bohemia, which is now part of the Czech Republic.  It wasn't until I moved to Cheboygan that I ever met anybody's grandparent who didn't speak with a foreign, usually Slavic, accent.  I think it's just human nature to care more about your own people than you do about other people's people.  If that makes me a racist, so be it.

I seem to remember that Europe was overrun with refugees from the Middle East a few years ago.  They finally had to start turning them away because there were just too many of them.  I don't know how many the Slavic countries accepted, but I seem to remember that they accepted a bunch of refugees from Vietnam when there were too many of them for us to take care of.  Last I heard, there were upwards of two million Ukrainian refugees so far.  We had that many illegal crossings of our southern border only last year, and that's just the ones they caught.  To be fair, that was a record breaker, usually it's closer to one million.  I don't see why we can't make room for at least that many Slavic immigrants.  Diversity is a good thing, right?  

When I was stationed in Berlin, popular mythology held that Hitler was the only bad German who had ever lived.  I find it hard to believe that he murdered all those Jewish people and ran roughshod over much of Europe all by himself, he must have had help.  The same could be said about Stalin, Genghis Khan, and Atilla the Hun.  I can't think of any historical figure who rose to national leadership without a little help from his friends.  Even Moses had a least one Friend in high places.