Give me your tired, your poor,
Emma Lazarus (1849–1887)
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
I don’t usually write about politics, mostly because I’m not very good at it, but it seems these days that things are just getting worse in the world we live in. The quote at the top of this post graces the plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty. It seems ironic now, considering the actions of the government.
In the USA, it seems – and I can only speak to what I’ve read in the news or the internet – that deportation is rampant. It’s one thing to send home troublemakers who come to your country as a destabilising influence. It’s entirely another to send home refugees. It was on the backs of such refugees that the USA was built, and to see it (or at least it’s government) turning on these people is to be honest, sickening if not unexpected.
And none of this is to say the USA is the only guilty party here, just one stand-out example highlighted by it’s claim of being the “land of the free“. The UK has similar policies under its Conservative government too, and many other European states too. Australia is no different either. We are all guilty!
Here in the UK, the government is moving further and further to the right with every passing week. The opposition parties refuse to work with each other against this menace, preferring instead to push each other down in the vain hope that they can be the next second-place party, and maybe to share in the scraps of power dropped from Boris Johnson’s table.
We in the West, we claim to be the civilised ones, setting an example to the rest of the world. We’re making it all into a lie. Whether we be European, American, Asian or from any other continent… what happened to us all? We fought two world wars last century to defeat fascism and xenophobia. Why now do we elect them to rule or lives?