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| Red Eye touts unity, governors don't |
So
I had an initial reaction of “What a dink!” when I learned this weekend that
Hoosier Gov. Mike Pence was engaging in a knee-jerk reaction being taken by
many Republican gubernatorial types – people who are citizens of Syria are
being banned from resettlement efforts into Indiana.
IT
SUPPOSEDLY MAKES the Hoosier State “more safe” from the type of activity that
occurred on Friday (on 11/13/15, to be exact) in Paris. After all, one of the
people who may have been involved in that terroristic act was a Syrian citizen.
But
now that I’m back in Illinois, I learn that our very own governor – the one who
claims he’s not interested in partisan politics but just cares about the good
of the people – feels compelled to do the same, exact thing.
Gov.
Bruce Rauner made his own statement during the morning hours, with the initial
news reports going out during the noon hour on Monday.
People
who might be trying to flee Syria and have hopes of going into exile in the
United States are going to have certain places forbidden to them – all because
some people want to gain political points for themselves by taking the
knee-jerk negative reaction. Even if it might be a Syrian refugee who is trying
to escape the nonsense that has overtaken his home nation.
NO
MORE SYRIA. Even though I suspect many of these same ideologues wouldn’t have a
clue where on the map Syria is, or anything about that Middle Eastern nation.
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| Rauner follows lead of Pence, ... |
Excuse
me for thinking that I don’t feel any more (or less) safe now than I did on Sunday,
or last week or even last year.
I
just happen to believe that the kind of people who coordinated the sorts of
activities that took place in Paris on Friday (or in New York and suburban D.C.
some 14 years ago) aren’t formal activities of any government. Thinking we can
do anything based off nationality or citizenship is so short-sighted!
I’d
have more respect for Bruce Rauner if he didn’t just follow his political party’s
ideological line. If it appeared he put some real thought into this issue!
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| ... while Pence follows GOP overall lead |
BECAUSE
I HONESTLY believe this action without any real thought behind it merely
creates the camouflage that we’re somehow seriously reacting to an
international incident without doing a real thing that would make us more safe.
If
anything, it comes across as a more shallow gesture than all the political
rhetoric that got spewed in the early 2000s when people were eager to bash
about France when the perception among the ideologues of our society was that
France wasn’t being tough enough to support our interests.
If
I never hear the tacky “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” line, it will be too
soon. What amazes me is that when that line originated in an episode of “The
Simpsons,” it was meant to be so ridiculously over-the-top that no one could possibly
take it seriously.
Instead,
way too many people did, along with coming up with all kinds of other tacky
epithets and sentiments.
IT
MAKES ME wonder if any of those individuals are feeling any differently these
days, particularly now that France’s military engaged in its own offensive
strikes against places in Syria – chosen largely because of their ties to the
ISIS group of people who think they’re promoting Islam in the same way the Ku
Klux Klan claims to advance Christianity in this nation.
I
don’t think many of us really understand a thing about what happened last week
in Paris, or what is going on in the Middle East. We just want to rant! I don’t
think we even care who we’re ranting about; so long as we can turn the volume
up loud.
And
while Rauner spent some time Monday morning doing a little ranting, he may have
made himself feel better.
But
that was a little less time spent trying to figure out how to resolve the state’s
financial problems and budget status for real. Except that to many of us prefer
to just rant and rage about that issue as well.
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