The hypocrisy of the season

You may find it ironic, especially as the nation raises the ghosts of my ancestors and gives thanks for the colonization of our homeland, but you won’t find me rejecting Syrian refugees.

It’s been nearly 400 years since the Wampanoag welcomed the pilgrims to live in our territory. By the time our Massasoit, Oosameequan, made his peace with them more than half of the Mayflower passengers had died. They endured an incredible and harrowing journey packed like sardines in an ill equipped ship to a new frontier thousands of miles from their homeland. They were men, women and children who fled religious persecution. Sound familiar?

When I imagine what Oosameequan might have been thinking looking into the eyes of an English born child staring back at him with wanting wide blue eyes and wispy golden hair blowing over her fair skinned face, her only crime in her faith, his decision had to be easy. And despite what occurred in the next generation, I don’t regret the welcoming tradition that still thrives among the Wampanoag to this day.

As Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, along with more than half of our country’s narrow minded state leaders, paint Syrians and Muslims with a broad stroke of potential threat they achieve exactly what the terrorists want from us - fear.

I have room in my home and my heart for Syrian refugees. Because it isn’t the people that bring hatred, it’s an ideology that consumes them. Historically it was an ideology fueled by Manifest Destiny and endorsed by the Doctrine of Discovery that sanctioned the oppression, wars and genocide perpetrated on Native Americans. An ideology of intolerance to differences.

Turning that boatload of hapless pilgrims away wouldn't have changed that eventual outcome. Change will come when we are consumed by knowledge, respect and tolerance for others. Stripping the ideology of hate in the name of false gods of any integrity. Like the Parisian man who lost his wife in the attack on Paris earlier this month but refused to answer hate with more hate.

Last week I was comforted to hear President Barak Obama offer clarity on the issue of what to do with refugees when he said that our greatest weapon against terrorists is to be fearless. But who was really paying attention?

As you gather together on the holiday inspired by this nation's original refugees feasting on your cornucopia of good fortune will you be serving hypocrisy pie for desert?

Closing our country to fleeing Syrians is not only the wrong thing to do, it will only provide a false sense of security. Our borders, like those around the globe, are eminently porous. Even Donald Trump’s money can’t build a wall high enough to shut us in. And if he could, is that really what we want?

Are our memories so short that we don’t remember how our nation breeds terrorists? From the government sanctioned genocide on Native American reservations to the wholesale lynching of blacks in the south by the KKK? Have we forgotten James Huberty gunned down 21 people in a San Diego McDonalds in 1984? The 1986 shooting in Edmond, Oklahoma when postal worker Patrick Sherrill killed 14 people making the term “going postal” a household phrase? That in 1991 George Hennard killed 22 people in a Luby’s restaurant in Killeen, Texas? In 1995 Timothy McVeigh was far more calculating when he made a 4,800 pound bomb of easily available materials and a truck load of fertilizer killing 168 people including children he knew to be playing in a day care in the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In 1999 Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold set out to commit the most heinous and unimaginable school shooting the nation had ever seen killing 13 classmates in Columbine, Colorado. Their vicious act has since trended among mentally unstable teens with access to guns only to be outdone in particularly savage fashion in 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut where Adam Lanza killed 20 first graders and six adults before he killed himself.

Carnage from mass shootings in places like Atlanta, Fort Worth, Honolulu, Wakefield, Red Lake Indian Reservation, Blacksburg, Omaha, Dekalb, Binghamton, Fort Hood, Tucson, Aurora, Washington, D.C., Charleston, Roseburg and too many other cities and towns across this nation to list have mounting body counts but can hardly be calculated in terms of devastated lives. All acts of terrorism committed here in this country - overwhelmingly by white men who are citizens of this country. The threat to America is already here and it’s called “U.S.”

Syrian civilians face a horrible fate. Trapped between ISIS militants and a corrupt and brutal government they have little choice but to risk their lives crossing dangerous seas in poorly equipped boats to foreign lands hoping to find refuge. Sound familiar?

To deny refuge to the truly disenfranchised and threatened innocents of the world, who are the real terrorists? Opening our boarders to refugees includes risk, but it’s risk far out weighted by the creation of a larger state of common good will toward an objective for world wide peace and understanding. Make that the dominant ideology, and while we are at it spread the word - killing in the name of your god does not make you a martyr and there are no virgins waiting for you in heaven.