Category: Quotations

This last weekend when 700 refugees vanished from a German center in Lower Saxony, migration experts said they had ‘no idea’ what could have motivated the young, able-bodied refugees, some of whom have just walked across nine countries, to leave, instead of sitting around waiting around for their half of a banana.

Movement is helpful – it gets the blood flowing to the brain – and you don’t need to tell a war refugee that any actual place is better than purgatory.

It is difficult to handle this influx: that’s the main sentence these days. It’s about much more than that.

The EU look pretty bad for supporting Turkey, whose (‘snap’) recently re-elected government has made things so difficult for its own people in its quest for power, intellectuals will opine it is ‘corrupt from the inside.’

But Turkey, who is more hospitable, and more tolerant, and who has been dealing with Syrian refugees a lot longer than have the Europeans, didn’t even raise a fuss until the Europeans, who are sick of the refugees already after only three months, brought them up.

Here’s how they ‘brought them up’: Germany’s chancellor, who ‘knows all about’ Turkey’s recent ‘humanitarian’ record gave Turkey money to deal with the refugees, which is not a bad thing on its own, but the EU should know that they can’t give three billion dollars to the current government two weeks before an election, and then be upset that now they have to play by that elected government’s rules.

When all the refugees started flooding into Germany I had just arrived here to live as well, and was proud of the German chancellor’s welcoming stance, but now in her selfie with the refugee all I see is a grimace. She didn’t take a principled stand for the good like people thought she had, because no one does in politics that I can see.

My grandfather used to wear a ball cap that said “Good Guys” in white on black, and last night when I was up thinking about all of this my mind went to the way he thrashed around while he was dying and they kept giving him more morphine. After he was gone, it took my mother and my grandmother and me exactly ten minutes to clear everything out of his room at the nursing home, and the last thing I placed in the box was a shirt my mother bought for him that still had the tags on it.

What is the point of having people in charge if no one can be a good guy, if no one can help the good guys?  A complete free-for-all would be better than this “let’s have a meeting about this transit zone” or let’s get together to discuss the possibility of that refugee status card,” because in a borderless free-for-all, at least it would be our own individual lives that were the guiding force. As it is now, babies are washing up on shores, and thousands more people are about to freeze, because of others’ indecision.

We need new ideas. The US and the EU both need to stop placating Saudi Arabia. If we could lessen our dependence on Saudi Arabia’s oil, for example, suddenly that country would find themselves with less money to send weapons to Syria.

No one in the US understands how deeply Iran is involved in Syria. We’ve been willing to bomb Syria for the past year, but we only started talking to Iran last week? When did sitting down and talking about something face to face become more threatening to us than military action? When did we all become such pussies?

I did hear a good story about astronauts. On the first three days of their mission this is how it went: on the first day, they talked about which country they were from. On the second day, looking down at Earth, they talked about it in terms of their continent. By the third day, they were speaking of their planet.