On Pro-Life Coexistence

07/21/2019

Dan Le Batard wrote fluently on compassion today.

His examples of Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul Jabbar struck a nerve. Those guys fought for their rights DURING the Civil Rights Era. But Colin Kaepernick gets crushed for (not) standing up because some people and politicians knew if they made it about the US flag, it would evoke a warped sense of patriotism that would tie their constituents even tighter to the Party. Decidedly devious, and ignorantly dangerous.

My actual editorial starts here, feel free to skip if you're not in the mood for my rambling...

The saddest part of those who makes excuses for what this President is willing to say and do - whether it's because he does whatever he can to win (knows how to stoke negative emotion effectively), represents the kind of man some men wish they could be all the time (everyone here knows this kind of man in real life, he's not to be envied for his existence is smoke and mirrors) or is actually a bad human (or all three): those people making excuses may actually be decent people caught in this hurricane of moral failure the President so casually set loose during his first campaign. Those people may also simply lack humanity to an uncertain degree. Unsure, don't know most of them, don't want to misjudge so harshly that I lose my own compassion.

My position, apolitically: you've certainly lost your way if you believe compassion should be limited. Or if you believe the kids at the border and their families don't deserve the same chance your forefathers got when they came here, illegally or otherwise. Or if you think Sheriff Joe's operation in AZ is fine because his "inmates" are degenerate drug addicts that he's "rehabbing." Or if you think immigrants are to blame for economic woes. That's actually doubly ignorant; automation is taking jobs from everyone and could care less about where you're from or how you look. Read Andy Yang some time, that guy has a pulse on America few other politicians do.

This is really about your values: what they are, how consistently you apply them (or how convenient you make them), how far they reach and how willing you are to exercise them for a stranger in need, particularly one who doesn't look or speak or dress like you. A lot of strangers out there that need us to step up where they can't. 

That's true compassion imo. That's how we - the first immigrant generations - made America great in the first place. People of all colors fleeing from the daily dread of much worse places, persecuted for all manner of machination, or simply for existing. Those people working tirelessly to give someone else a chance at the privilege required to stand a chance in a capitalist system that produces winners and losers daily, and takes deeper cuts from minorities and women than its forefathers' descendants.

That's the ideal for which we should strive: unrelenting, unconditional compassion. It's not easy, at all. I struggle to have compassion for people who hate Arabs, for example.

But imagine if we tried...wouldn't that be better than chanting "send her back" for a man who believes we are here for his glory alone? I think so.