Now If That Isn't an Irony!

All through my Christian life—for 55 years—so many Christians emphasized that the only way for all humans to have peace is for humans to accept Jesus as their Savior, to become a Christian.

Then they will change, peace will come in their lives, and they will act in peace, and eventually—at least by the time Jesus returns—peace will come to all of the world.

Here’s one famous phrase—“The Prince of Peace is the only one who can change it [stop war, stop hatred, stop injustice, etc.] by changing one heart at a time.”

BUT the EXACT opposite has happened. For generations.

In every generation, the vast majority of those ‘changed-one-heart-at-a-time,’ born-again-devout Christians are the very humans who are most pro-war, even strongly supporting the slaughter of civilians, and often emphasizing nationalism!

They even now are claiming that everyone ought to put “America First”!

Arrest a 12-year-old disabled girl at the hospital where she just had surgery because she isn't a native citizen, even though she has lived in the U.S. since she was 3 months old.

Send her to a border station internment place by herself.

Forcibly separate thousands of children, including over 100 under 5, from their refugee parents, and move them to facilities far away from their parents in other states!

Utter selfishness, injustice, and no peace.

Now if that isn’t an irony.




Instead,

Seek the Light of justice, reconciliation, compassion, human rights, equality, and so much more.

Act today for those who are impoverished, those who are suffering, those who are oppressed.

Daniel Wilcox

Human Rights Have NO Borders

Another massive ICE raid against hard-working undocumented immigrants:

"A family member of one of the arrested Corso's workers: "My soon to be brother-in-law was deported this morning...He was brought here as a young boy. He's worked at Corso's for many years. They paid him good money. By no means did they pay him what they think immigrants should be paid. They paid him good money.

"He did a good job and worked hard to provide for his family. He's got a six-month-old daughter," she added.

Allegedly, many children were left at day-care facilities because their parents couldn't pick them up.

This arresting of hardworking humans is so morally wrong! Arresting individuals who aren't criminals, and deporting people who were brought here as children is not only unfair, it's a violation of human rights:-((((.

If someone has crossed a political border without permission, he/she ought to get a ticket like a person who goes over the speed limit.

Instead of this persecution of so many immigrants, these millions of dollars ought to be spent on the pursuit violent criminals and money could be spent on more local interaction of police with their communities. What a tragic waste to have huge dollar amounts spent on over hundred police officers handcuffing diligent working individuals at their place of employment!

POLICE OUGHT to be arresting violent criminals, not hard-working individuals.

Everyone ought to be ashamed of this self-centered turn away from justice and equality by the United States.

ICE arrests 114 at Ohio garden center in major mass raid
Eric Levenson
By Carma Hassan and Eric Levenson, CNN

(CNN)US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested 114 undocumented immigrants working at an Ohio gardening business in one of its largest workplace raids in recent years.

"It is the largest in our region in the last decade," said Khaalid Walls, spokesman for ICE's Northeastern region, which comprises Michigan, Ohio, and Upstate New York.
In April, ICE arrested nearly 100 people accused of being in the US illegally at a Tennessee meatpacking plant. At the time, immigration rights groups said that operation was ICE's largest workplace raid in a decade.
Tuesday's arrests targeted employees of Corso's Flower and Garden Center in Sandusky and Castalia, Ohio, Walls said.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/06/us/ice-undocumented-immigrants-arrests-garden-ohio/index.html

Work for justice, equality, and hope for ALL HUMANS. Human rights have NO BORDERS.

In the LIGHT,

Daniel Wilcox

From Abandoned to Hope: An Undocumented Immigrant Teen

Abandoned when he was only 5 years old, Daniel Morales lived and somehow managed to survive on the streets in a Latin American country despite all the crime, poverty, and other dangers.

Finally, as a teen when faced with threats to join a gang, Daniel did what so many refugees have done, he rode the "beast"--on top of trains up through Mexico to the U.S., a very dangerous journey.

Yes, there are horrific stories, too, of the criminals that Daniel managed to avoid. Some of the latter also enter the United States illegally and get lots of front page news because of their immoral actions including rape and murder. But they are a minority.

It's time that we Americans focus on the HOPE stories, the innocent Dreamers whose only crime is sneaking across a border in order to escape crime, poverty, and injustice.

Daniel is one such incredible narrative of hope.

How he managed to get into the U.S. is unknown, but it can be imagined from reading daily news of arrests of illegal immigrants every week along the Mexico-U.S. border.

Hannah Eash-Gates, Daniel's legal representative and former member of Mennonite Voluntary Service, said, Daniel "is relentlessly positive." According to her, Daniel is "incredibly bright. Even without a formal education, taught himself to read and write."

Daniel and Hannah met at the Refuge and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) in San Antonio, Texas where Hannah worked for MVS.

"In the two years it took for Eash-Gates to help Morales achieve legal permanent residency status, he made it on the honor roll and learned two languages!"

Read more about helping undocumented immigrants and others in the Mennonite magazines, Extending Beyond, Beyond Ourselves, and the websites of Mennonite Central Committee.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Giant Image of Toddler Peers Over U.S. Border Wall

A giant toddler structure built by French artist JR peers over the U.S. Border Wall to California from Tecate, Mexico. The wall extends at least 650 miles.
Photo from JR

"Now, as an artist, I think that it's amazing that the piece arrived at a moment when it creates more dialogue because the idea itself is to raise more questions."
--JR

The French artist got the idea to create the massive border photo from a vivid dream he had of a toddler peering into the U.S. So he went to Mexico and sought out a family who would let him erect a huge picture on their property.

Finally, he met a Mexican mother living along the border wall who agreed to his plans. JR said, "There was a little kid looking at us the whole time with two hands on the side of his crib looking at us...he looks exactly like that kid I dreamed of.' "

That toddler, Kikito, is only 1 year old. He has "no idea that's a wall that divides people — he has no idea of the political context," JR imagined. "What is he thinking?"

"...we know all the implications, what it represents, how it divides. But for a kid, I didn't have the answer."

“I said hello to the little kid, and we played a little. But, I didn’t think of photographing him.”

However, soon after as he drove away, it suddenly hit him that Kikito reminded him of the little kid in his dream so he turned around and drove back to the woman's house. "He's the little kid." So he took the toddler's photo and enlarged it to a gigantic size.
-
"...within days of the Trump administration's decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program protecting 800,000 immigrants, JR erected a massive artwork towering dozens of feet above the existing wall.

The boy, hair swept to the side and focus drawn by an unseen object, peeks with evident interest from the Mexican side over the slats of the wall at...California, as if looking over the railing of his crib."

"Basically, we had to build a bigger wall to make this [U.S. Border] wall look ridiculous."
--

"Most of the people, [who see the wall, or even drive there] if you read the comments, [were] not talking politics or they didn't mention the name of the president. It was about people."
--

JR hopes that his border project will continue to bring people to the wall, to talk through the metal slats, even after he takes down his art. He has 1 million Instagram followers.

Already, "visitors on both sides chatted through the slats of the fencing and passed phones back and forth to photograph each other. People on the US side took selfies through the holes of the wall with visitors on the Mexico side. At that moment, the wall almost became invisible.

"Two smiling men in beards hold up a phone as they stand in front of fence; on other side, you can see women smiling and making the peace sign with their fingers. People on the US side of the border take selfies through the border wall with people in Mexico on the other side, just below JR’s art installation." Sonia Narang/PRI

“I think that’s the most interesting part, the fact that it connects people.

I always love to think as an ethnologist,” said JR. “The fact that you went there, and you tell me that people exchanged their phones through the fence and it created interaction between people that would never talk, for me, that’s the most amazing part of the project.”

The toddler's mother "from her window now looks up to see the massive silhouette of her child every day."

"She said, 'you know, it's my son and I can recognize him, but I hope for the others, it represents any kid, any person — anyone that has dreams, and dreams that are not alienated by any political vision or any prejudice...'"
from Heard on All Things Considered
COLIN DWYER
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/08/549491208/as-boy-peers-curiously-over-border-wall-his-artist-asks-what-is-he-thinking



In the Light of HOPE and Sharing, NOT dividing with walls,

Daniel Wilcox

Guest Post: Illegal Aliens--What is this "Crime"?

GUEST POST: from-- What Is This "Crime," Really?
BY Orson Scott Card

10-year-old ill girl, who has lived in the U.S. since an infant, arrested by ICE at a hospital where she just had surgery. She was taken to a detention center:-(


"Since the only crime most of these people are committing is simply being here without permission, we would give them a reasonable way to get that permission without losing everything else in order to get it."
--

"A fifteen-year-old boy...has been yearning for his driver's license for a long time.

But today all thoughts of waiting for his license are out the window, because his little sister cut herself and he can't stop the bleeding. His parents aren't home.

So David puts his sister in the car and, holding a towel on the wound to apply pressure, he drives the car one-handed out onto the road and goes as fast as the car can go, heading for the nearest medical emergency center.

...a state trooper sees him driving too fast and pulls him over. David tries to explain that he's only driving illegally in order to save his sister's life, but the trooper doesn't listen.

He drags David out of the car and handcuffs him and yells at him...

David..."My sister is bleeding to death! Let me get her to the hospital!"

But it's as if the trooper is deaf to anything David has to say."
--

"I'm sick at heart about the number of Americans, including friends of mine who should know better, who are proud of being exactly like that state trooper, when it comes to the question of illegal immigrants.

"They have no right to be here in the first place. If we give these people amnesty and let them stay and apply for citizenship, we only encourage more illegal immigration in the future. Besides, they use up our welfare and add to our school costs without paying taxes!"

In vain do the immigrants try to explain that their families were desperately poor, doomed to continue to live on the edge of starvation, and the only hope was America ... which wouldn't let them in.

Why can't we look at what these people are actually doing? Why can't we see the bleeding child in the passenger seat, and realize that most of these illegal immigrants are doing precisely what you or I would do in the same circumstances?
--
So what is this vile crime of "illegal immigration" that requires us to throw out hard-working people...?

It consists of crossing over an arbitrary line that somebody drew in the dirt a century and a half ago. On one side of the line, poverty, hopelessness, a social system that keeps you living as a peasant, keeps your children uneducated and doomed to the same miserable life you have -- or worse.

On the other side of the line, plenty of jobs that are going begging because nobody who lives on that side is desperate enough to work all day for a wage so low. But the wage is enormous to you. It would save your family's lives, give you hope for your children...

Wouldn't you take any risk to get across that line?

*
We Americans, what exactly did we do to earn our prosperity, our freedom? Well, for most of us, what we did was: be born.

Yeah, we work for our living and pay our taxes and all that, but you know what? I haven't seen many native-born American citizens who work as hard as the Mexican-born people I see working in minimum-wage jobs in laundries and yard services and intermittent subcontracting projects and other semi-skilled and unskilled positions.

I have no idea which (if any) of the people I see doing this work are legals and which are illegals -- but that's my point. Latin American immigrants, as a group, are hard-working, family-centered, God-fearing people who contribute mightily to our economy.
--

"But they come here and commit crimes and live off of our welfare system!"

Wait a minute. Who is "they"? All of the illegal immigrants?

Only a certain percentage of them. But when we round up illegal immigrants, do we make the slightest effort to distinguish between those who commit crimes here, those who scam the system to get welfare, and those who are working hard and living by all the rules?

No. We send them all home. There is, under present law, no special treatment for illegal immigrants who, during their time in the U.S., work hard and don't take anything from anybody without paying for it.
--

And yet most of the illegal immigrants commit no crimes, but instead live frugally and work hard. In fact, I dare say that many illegal immigrants work harder and obey our social rules more faithfully than a good many citizens whose right to live within our borders is unquestioned.

And if all you can say to that is, "It doesn't matter, send them all home, give them no hope of citizenship because we don't want to reward people for breaking the law to enter our country," then here's my answer to you:

Let's apply that standard across the board. No mercy. No extenuating circumstances. No sense of punishment that is proportionate to the crime. Let's handle traffic court that way.

The penalty for breaking any traffic law, from now on, is: revocation of your license and confiscation of your car. Period...Driving 70 in a 65 zone on the freeway? No license, no car.
--

No mercy, no exceptions, no consideration for the differences between traffic offenders.
--

"But it wouldn't be fair!" you reply.

That's right. It wouldn't be fair. Yet that's exactly the same level of fairness that I hear an awful lot of Americans demanding in order to curtail the problem of illegal immigration.
--

The only thing that makes illegal immigration a problem is that it's illegal. If we simply opened our southern border the way all our borders were open in the 1800s, then would there be any continuing burden?

Most of these immigrants would still work hard, only now they would have their families with them and the money would not drain away to Mexico. Those who prospered would pay income taxes. So economically, there would be an improvement.

Some would freeload off the system...There is no major immigrant group that has not spawned its criminals. Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese, Russian Jews...

And yet we would have regarded it as a great injustice to throw out all the immigrants from each of these groups, just because some of them committed crimes. In this country, we have a long tradition of punishing only the individual who does wrong, not his entire ethnic group.
--

So what, exactly, would be the cost to us of an open-door immigration policy? What evidence do we have that the immigrants who would flood across our boundaries would be any worse than the waves of Irish, German, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Japanese, or British immigrants?
--

By one perfectly rational reading of history, the whole southwestern quarter of the United States actually consists of unjustly conquered territory in which the native inhabitants -- the legal citizens -- were torn apart from their fellow citizens to the south, and our immigration policy consists of denying Mexicans the right to access lands that were historically theirs, and where former Mexican citizens who were involuntarily annexed to the U.S. were long oppressed and discriminated against.
--

There is no historical basis for any American to claim the moral high ground when talking about Mexican immigration to the United States.
--
Since the only crime most of these people are committing is simply being here without permission, we would give them a reasonable way to get that permission without losing everything else in order to get it.
--

Why in the world do we regard that as a crime?"

by Orson Scott Card
Go to his website to read the rest of his important essay:
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2006-06-25-1.html
--

Especially, we need to give the Dreamers--little kids and infants brought here many years ago--the chance to stay here and become citizens.

There ought to be NO MORE tragic debacles of justice such as ICE, recently, arresting a 10-year-old ill girl after her surgery and taking her to a deportation center, even though she has lived in the U.S. since being brought here as an infant!

NO MORE splitting up of hard-working families as uncompassionately happened this last month in Michigan and Illinois. In the one case a hard-working professor who has lived in the U.S. for over 30 years, was arrested after dropping his kids off at school:-(

Consider Card's wise words of wisdom which strongly counter all the other narrow, self-centered Christian nationalism of 'U.S. First, First...'






In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox