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Enough already. How did we get to be so lucky to have harvest (it’s that season) baskets heaped with corn silk and nonsense? 

If you hear an either-side position on immigration there’s rarely a word given on how to do that effectively and humanitarily (new word, you’ll get it). 

My family was minorly (did it again because I know you’ll cope) involved in hosting refugee migrants. At the go-get we were told, knew and accepted this would be a long-term commitment. People from semi tropics were not necessarily ready for Minnesota February. Ours weren’t. Pretty much hated it, they did, and headed southward to warmth ‘bout soon as they were able. Couldn’t really blame them. They after all had half a decade to grasp English skills, adjust and decide, which they did. To go south.

Of the few my family was involved with a couple remain and one was likely swallowed up in an Asian killing field. I’ll likely never know that fate, but I do know the importance of commitment to the future of the immigrant necessary for the process to (what I think) works well. 

The lives of living people are not a product to be stamped out mass-production like plastic drink bottles. We can and should do better, but be real. There’s no way of the godly green to scrunch two years adjusting and learning and settling in to some months and a hotel stay. No where and no how will that be sufficient. It is simply and plainly not, so in my view playing along with that delusional approach is wrong – doomed from the start. 

It is not humanitarian to treat people like a commodity crop to be shipped here-there at convenience. People aren’t tomatoes. Why in hell unworkable and cruel policy should be accepted and rewarded is beyond me. I’m a plain no-count Ranger import with little skin in any game, but I know pretending time can be rushed and mishandling people are both wrong things to do. (If former college students born here and possibly somewhat in synch with the language, culture and system are considered impoverished by debt from a decade past how, then, is a newcomer supposed to be whoop up to speed in record time? There’s a petard thing for you.) 

My grandmother who trudged and trained with my baby father under arm from Central Europe during WWI would likely call mistreatment of immigrants a sin. She was highly religious and saw things in that silly-old way. 

But, she’d be right because bad behavior stinks no matter how you call it. But, believe me, being better focused and humane in attitude (and in scope I might add) doesn’t mean all will be calm and peaceful. People being the critters they are will find a way and ways to be difficult. 

In a largely Irish Chicago neighbor-hood, my father and his brothers were “dirty Polacks.” Dad and sibs didn’t get over and through that by giving kisses and cookies. No. The noses of Irish boys had to end bloodied as their own before some semblance of peace was reached. 

Am I saying that’s the way to go? No. Am saying a way forward will have bumps, big ones if the cultures involved are dissimilar. That seem unlikely to you? But wait, some will have to adjust their head positions first. Needful and necessary, that. Professionalism exists in questionable areas along with the respected fields. 

But whether the crooked one is an amateur or a pro, either way, you can end up ruined or dead. Would you feel better about the result if it was done by a professional con man (sexist but probably OK), an opportunist or an overreaching politico?

I mentioned my grandmother not for sympathy, etc. She was rather unimpressive, though with a sharp eye for eight year old boys drawn to chocolate icing. I’d get near and a wooden spoon found me. Thump, hungry dreams scattered. 

Got through it. Part of being a kid is learning lots of things just like that in just that way, the hard way which is perhaps best in sticking power. A half-hour cooing about being a “good boy” with heapings of instructive platitudes would take (waste) more time and be less (by far) effective than the dratted wooden spoon meeting some portion of me that didn’t want to be met. “OUT! OUT! GET OUT!” I got and stayed out.

Yet why, when practical and oft times personal sense saying otherwise, are s’ many of us so willing to prevaricate, bargain, wheedle and concede in the face of obvious (admittedly harsh) realities? 

‘Nother words, asks this Ranger dumb bunny, who stewed up the notion of proportional hostility? Who? What non-place did they have to be from to come up with that nonsense and then apply the added stupid of saying it is kind, humane and will save lives? 

Making things worse by extending war is not kind, will extend hostilities and not save lives. Likely more will be killed in a longer, kinder, proportioned conflict. 

Take Pearl Harbor as example. If after that event the U.S. took a humane proportional tack it would have to bomb and strafe a similar port on a Japanese island and achieve a similar casualty tally. 

We good now? No. Absolutely not because no tally will ever be equivalent, meaning there will be grievance aplenty to cook up a proportioned response that will in turn lead to guess what? More attacks followed by other attacks and on it would go. 

When necessary war needs to be done with the aim of winning, quicker the better as that reduces deaths instead of spreading them, like feuds, over generations. Ugly, nasty, brutal and not to be relished, war is bad business. Ending war with an enemy defeated is the best shot at temporary peace. Temporary? Peace is always temporary because there’s always some leader, belief, society or politic that wants what others have or want to lumber their paradise on others. What did the dead Greeks say? 

Only the dead know peace. Those five words remain too true.