THE OWL'S EYE

We live in strange times. Wars and rumors of wars everywhere.

I hovered at a window sill recently. There I employed my Owl's Eye to read a hard-to-believe notice in a newspaper. It seems the great United States has limited refugees to be accepted to our shores to only 7,500 a year. 7,500 refugees. That's the size of Oneonta, Alabama...even if you include all their covered bridges in your calculation.

I have looked into their eyes. Refugees know stark, breath-heaving fear. This dread we once named the "Thousand Yard Stare." Your body simply cannot bear more terror, and locks upon a distant, unseen nowhere. Bosnia, a war now long forgotten, brought terrified people tramping across national and ethnic borders, there to be subject to an equally terrifying, unknown future. Another story. Soviets in Afghanistan drove families from lands they'd known for generations, creating terrors which will last generations more. Today, we live in a world which makes fear the only card left to refugees unwelcome in our own country. They cost too much money. They aren't like me, they aren't worth my time. This from a "country of Christians."

Such people known as refugees want the elemental requirements of human dignity. Is there someone to help heal my injury, feed my children, or simply guide me somewhere safe?

We learn what the word defenseless means to victims of our modern age. For instance, I once visited the 'Palm Church' of St. Nikolaus, in Leipzig, Germany. This is where the peace marches that brought down East German Communism in November 1989 began. People finally said "Enough!" to the lies they were forced to live every day, and marched to put an end to deception as government. I found how a Catholic Permanent Deacon in distant Moulton, Alabama, was present to the poorest of the poor in this remote, impoverished part of America. We live in a bizarre world where we demand the right to life, but deny a "quality of life" to others once born. We take away basic health protections, a decent job, education, and hope from those we don't consider part of our brave new world.

I recall my Afghani friend Shokria and her three boys. Protected by the Dutch government, they existed in a refugee's dread of hearing news of her husband, held incommunicado as a hostage by the Soviets during the Afghan-Soviet war. With the war's end, her tortured husband was reunited with his young family. Gratefully, they all survived because the Dutch nation saw them as more than a financial debit. A visitor from Croatia observed our Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, and noted how it could be miles longer were it to include those severely wounded by the loss of a loved one or friend in that war. We in Limestone County live among refugees from that Vietnam War.

We who have not fled for our lives from murderous Sudanese thugs known as "armies," or Russian gangsters referred to as mercenaries in Ukraine can't imagine what hope for a safe tomorrow means. Would we all suffer more if we allowed these desperate people to find a home here? Believe me, they want to go home, but cannot. Without any peace in their own countries, mind shattered mothers, their hungry, wild-eyed children, and elderly relatives are trapped. Escape from their native land was their only hope. They dreamed of America. You know the America they wanted to come to. The one where a poem by Emma Lazarus at the Statue of Liberty reads:

Now you can buy American residency for a million bucks. But you can't be accepted as a refugee, because money is our standard now. No? I wish I hadn't read that article over the man's shoulder when I hovered at the window.