Hardship

The mayor of Warren, Michigan recently complained about the possible influx of Iraqi refugees into his city. He said it would be "a hardship".

In an effort to calm public fears, Michigan Senator Carl Levin said the numbers of refugees sited by the mayor (15,000) were “misleading”. This year, the U.S. can expect to settle only about 2,000 Iraqi refugees, and in total, the State Department has agreed to absorb only 25,000 of the (so far) 2.2 million Iraqi refugees, to be spread around the country.

In case you don't have a calculator handy, 25,000 out of 2.2 million comes to 1%. Is it just me, or does that seem like a shamefully small percentage? After all, this was *our* war. Our president and his pals came up with the idea. Our congress persons voted to authorize it. Indeed most Americans were gung-ho about it in the beginning. Those who urged caution were disparaged as unpatriotic terrorist sympathizers. Five years on, it doesn’t look like we can fix what we broke in Iraq. Most Americans have come to the conclusion that we should cut our losses and hope for the least worst of all the terrible possibilities. That’s a rational decision, but it doesn’t follow that we can then wash our hands of the whole thing and go on with our lives as if nothing happened. We certainly can't wash our hands of the financial cost: we and our children will be paying the $444, 937,600,000 and counting for this war. And we should not wash our hands of the moral costs either.

Actions have consequences. Accepting refugees from the horror that we largely created may be more or less avoidable, but what our moral responsibility? Those of us not in the military have sacrificed next to nothing. We’ve only been asked to be patient and keep shopping! I don’t care to suffer hardship any more than Mr. Mayor and the good folks of Warren, but I’m seriously questioning what right I, or any American, has to be exempt from it in this case. If I really knew what it was like to suffer even a fraction of the hardship that a woman my age in Baghdad is suffering, I’d probably be offering to put her and her family up in my own house! Maybe some hardship for Americans is exactly what justice demands. It’s a bitter thought, but passing off the burden of refugees almost solely onto Iraq’s neighbors while we agree to accept only 1% seems shameful and cowardly.