Have Tot, Will Travel

800 words

I’m sure by now you’ve seen that awful picture of the little refugee boy. Drowned off the coast of Turkey due to cruel European control of the laws of physics, his arms in a gracefully pathetic “hug me, I’m dead” position, he’s been passed around Facebook as “evidence” that Europe must open her doors to the fresh wave of walking sob stories that’s been unleashed by US intervention in Syria.

Once I got over my visceral reaction to . . . er, no, I wasn’t reacting to the powerful image of the tragic death of a child. Sorry, I’m a monster with a womb of stone.

Toddler, n.: A creature which anyone who isn’t a bloody-minded sentimental fool knows is not yet capable of thinking or feeling anything less rudimentary than a hamster. Was this one worth sucking dry the pockets of the dozens of working European adults it would have taken to rear it to the age of reason? Consider the likelihood, after all, that “reason” in this case would have likely been limited to reading the Koran and thinking of new reasons to hate the worker bees that fed it.

No, my visceral reaction was to everyone else’s visceral reaction.

Which, in the United States, seemed to be: “Someone else must do something! I will limit my own involvement to hysterically mob-guilt-tripping Europe!” My visceral reaction was to punch all their lights out.

Anyway, my second thought was: “Why are we giving all these parents of toddlers so much special pity and consideration? I have no sympathy whatsoever for anyone who conceives a child in a war zone.”

Do the math: The U.S. invasion may have only begun this summer, but the Syrian civil war has been going on since 2011. Anyone there with a child under five should have pulled a few things out of a few other things, beginning with excising his head from his fundament. (Unless he is unaware of how children are made—in which case, do we want such a genius and his progeny multiplying over Europe?)

But after perusing image after image after image of lightly smirking sufferers holding up their crying children—or in the case of teenagers, holding up their stagily crying selves—I began to entertain a horrible thought.

What if childbirth during wartime is a rational act? As long as one is within swimming distance of the suckers of Europe, anyway. What if these tear-jerking little urchins have been created not as an accident, but as a passport?

People all over the world have televisions and cell phones. People (grown people, that is) aren’t stupid. Anyone can see that these adorable little suffering faces will make it easier to guilt Europe into coughing up space, housing, and the promised land of the public dole.

American liberals and hand-wringers—safe on the other side of an ocean, safe from the hostile human tide our own interventionist insanity has created—meanwhile blame Europe for trying to protect her borders. We want to shame Europe into accepting another severe demographic shift that may well wipe her out culturally, especially considering the European elite’s chickenshit attitude toward demanding assimilation. All in the name of “Someone must do something because children!”

Well, shame on you morons. If there should be a finger pointing anywhere except the White House, the Pentagon, and Syrian and ISIS leadership, it should be pointing straight at those ethically hideous individuals who create their own hostages—at the risk of any horrors those hostages might eventually encounter. No preggy, no drowny. I’m certainly not the first to say that the only truly humane foreign aid packages are the ones stuffed with condoms.

But instead this will happen: the European politicians will be beaten down by the fingers of the world wagging in their direction. It won’t be take much pressure nor hurt them excessively; after all, they don’t live in the neighborhoods where they will be magnanimously parking all these hostage takers. Nor will their standard of living be much affected by the cost. Perhaps they will feel a twinge of guilt as the available budget for preserving the architectural and art treasures of old Europe is eaten away, but after all they have their own Degas in the drawing room.

And the only villains in the end—in the press anyhow—will be the little franchouillard schlubs who have to pay for the mess, and live next to the refugees, and watch their rent shoot up and the noose of the job market tighten round their necks and whose nasty xenophobic squeaks of protest at shouldering the sins of the world will be roundly laughed at. Meanwhile, their daughters are xenophobically raped, and their cars xenophobically set on fire, and everyone else pats each other on the back . . . And so it goes.