The Alternative

Open arms
 
     Coming soon to a neighborhood near you: Refugees. A new kind of foreign invasion is about to change our daily lives. Thanks to the neo-cons, increased diversity will enrich our cultural experience.
     There is much talk of welcoming the new arrivals to our kind and caring embrace (after all, they flee the results of our intervention). And much talk is also about turning them away (such icky multiculturalism will disrupt our lives terribly).
     In Austria, which is in the path from Syria to the generous (so far) state of Germany, gun stores are sold out. A new culture that views women as targets is making European women terrified at the prospects. The rest of Europe doesn’t have the gun store problem, as they abandoned the idea of legal self defense long ago.
     There is a reason for government: Enforcement of rules common to the inhabitants of a defined area.
     In a household, mom and dad are the government. Well, maybe not so much anymore now that dad is a government check and commitment is an anachronism. In a city, the city council and mayor use the police department to assure residents that cultural norms are not violated.
     Not long ago in the upper reaches of the Amazon, cultural norms included raiding and eating nearby tribes. That is why their government is there and ours is here. We wouldn’t want those Amazonians coming up here and eating us, and they would probably resent it if we forced them to eat mac and cheese instead of roast bicep.
     Governments do their job best when the limits of their effectiveness guide their scope.
     Smugglers who once found profit in guns and drugs are now moving people from war-torn Middle Eastern countries to Western Europe. The people are locked in trucks and abandoned factories as they wait for their ride. The smugglers rape and steal, then ditch them at any sign of trouble. Once regal neighborhoods in Bulgaria are now marketplaces for unscrupulous currency exchangers and traffickers.
     Politicians in the West are offering asylum to the refugees because they feel guilty for what they have wrought. The Middle East was once fairly stable. Dictators ruled over people unaccustomed to ruling over themselves. We traded with these countries on terms agreed to by both sides in spite of cultural differences.
     But that was not enough. In Iran, our CIA and British intelligence agents overthrew duly elected Mohammad Mossadegh and installed their ruthless puppet king, the Shah, in 1953 in order to have better access to Iranian oil. This is at the root of Iranian hatred of America. In 1979 the Iranians took their country back.
     This is just one example of how American support for one side of private disputes in sovereign nations has created our enemies over the years. The others are more recent and should be familiar with anyone who follows the news.
     Our regal neighborhoods could become like the dens of iniquity that are developing in Europe as those poor souls flee the terror that our meddling politicians have unleashed in the Middle East.
     And what of the lives of those politicians? They will be secure and safe in their gated communities, accompanied by their taxpayer-funded bodyguards. We who enabled those politicians will be left to deal with not just traffickers, as in the war on drugs, but also with the trafficked, much of which is an unseemly lot.
     Too bad we didn’t think of all this when we were acting all macho like John Wayne, striking out to make the rest of the world like our own. Instead, we get our own neighborhood becoming like the rest of the world.
 
     I welcome any comments on this column at 4selfgovernment@gmail.com or www.alternativebyfritz.com, or through a letter to the editor of this paper.