trinityvixen | Hello, have you met my aunt?

My lovely, kind, sweet aunt, she of the fundamentalist persuasion of religion, has sent an e-mail to my family mailing list titled The Plan. It's a semi-joking, isolationist, right-wing bit of propaganda. Parts of it were so awful I wanted to cry and throw up at the same time. That is not hyperbole. I felt sick. I felt sad. Sickened by what was supposed to be "funny" and "true" that was really insensitive, ignorant, and unjust. Sad that anyone could be so heartless, so unfeeling as to think this up, and sadder still that my aunt found anything about it worth repeating.

Before I send my response to the list, which is remarkably restrained until the end, even-handed and not too passionate where I could help myself about it, I offer it to my friends and ask them if I am being too harsh.

feiran, bless her, is more temperate about this and cautioned me against censuring a family member lest I get into trouble over a misunderstanding.

So, judge my response, please, and let me know, your own opinions on the subjects notwithstanding, whether it is safe to transmit to my family (safe in the sense that it conveys my hurt and outrage without being vindictive, caustic, mean, or likewise ignorant, insensitive, or broad-stroked).

First things first, the e-mail at the heart of this:

The Plan!

Robin Williams, wearing a shirt that says "I love New York" in Arabic.

You gotta love Robin Williams......
Even if he's nuts!
Leave it to Robin Williams to come up with the perfect plan.
What we need now is for our UN Ambassador to stand up
and repeat this message.

Robin Williams' plan...
(Hard to argue with this logic!) (actually not so, which the e-mail admits without saying whose plan it is, of course)

"I see a lot of people yelling for peace
but I have not heard of a plan for
peace. So, here's one plan."

1) "The US will apologize to the world for our "interference" in their affairs,
past & present.
You know, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Tojo, Noriega, Milosevic, Hussein,
and the rest of those "good ole boys", we will never "interfere" again.

2) We will withdraw our troops from all over the world, starting with Germany, South Korea, the Middle East, and the Philippines.
They don't want us there.
We would station troops at our borders.
No one allowed sneaking through holes in the fence.

3) All illegal aliens have 90 days to get their affairs together and leave.
We'll give them a free trip home.
After 90 days the remainder will be gathered up and deported immediately,
regardless of whom or where they are.
They're illegal!!! France will welcome them.

4) All future visitors will be thoroughly checked and limited to 90 days unless given a special permit!!!! No one from a terrorist nation will be allowed in.
If ! you don' t like it there, change it yourself and don't hide here.
Asylum would never be available to anyone.
We don't need any more cab drivers or 7-11 cashiers.

5) No foreign "students" over age 21. The older ones are the bombers. If they don't attend classes, they get a "D" and it's back home baby.

6) The US will make a strong effort
to become self-sufficient energy wise. This will include developing nonpolluting sources of energy but will require a temporary drilling of oil in the Alaskan wilderness. The caribou will have to cope for a while.

7) Offer Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries $10 a barrel for their oil.
If they don't like it, we'll go someplace else.
They can go somewhere else to sell their production.
(About a week of the wells filling up the storage sites would be enough.)

8) If there is a famine or other natural catastrophe in the world, we will not "interfere." They can pray to Allah or whomever, for seeds, rain, cement or whatever they need. Besides most of them know that what we give them is stolen or given to the army.
The people who need it most get very little, if anything.

9) Ship the UN Headquarters to an isolated island someplace. We don't need the spies and fair weather friends here. Besides, the building would make a good homeless shelter or lockup for illegal aliens.

10) All Americans must go to charm and beauty school. That way, no one can call us "Ugly Americans" any longer.

11) The Language we speak is ENGLISH...learn it...or LEAVE...

Now, isn't that a winner of a plan?

The Statue of Liberty is no longer
saying "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.
She's got a baseball bat and she's yelling, 'you want a piece of me?' "

If you agree with the above forward
it to friends...If not, and I would be amazed, DELETE it!!

May God bless you.
God Bless America.
In God We Trust

An interesting e-mail to be sure. I have some questions and corrections to “the plan.” This is a forum (of a sort), so why not voice them?

4) All future visitors will be thoroughly checked and limited to 90 days unless given a special permit!!!! No one from a terrorist nation will be allowed in.
If ! you don' t like it there, change it yourself and don't hide here.
Asylum would never be available to anyone.
We don't need any more cab drivers or 7-11 cashiers.

One question: How does one define a “terrorist nation” such that we might legislate visas and citizenship to keep citizens of a “terrorist nation” from entering the US?

As for cab drivers, aside from teenagers new to the work force, who would want to do that for the money you get (which, contrary to public opinion, isn’t very much)? And would you want teenage cab drivers? Or, if you owned a quick-stop business, to trust them to watch the shop in the late hours of a 24-hour store?

I cannot believe that the concept of asylum is under attack either. Asylum for criminals, I will concede to being unnecessary. Asylum for unarmed, underfed, hounded minorities being denied? No protection for the meek, the survivors/escapees of genocide? No protection of children so unfortunate to be born to men and women of the wrong color, political affiliation or religion? No guarantee that women will be guarded from rape as a means of punishing not themselves for their transgressions but the men they are—again, without choice—related to?

Where is Christian love and charity in that?

7) Offer Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries $10 a barrel for their oil.
If they don't like it, we'll go someplace else.
They can go somewhere else to sell their production.
(About a week of the wells filling up the storage sites would be enough.)

Where will we go? There was mention of drilling in Alaska. Regardless of how anyone feels about that as policy, there is the fact that we simply don’t have that much oil in reserve. The landmass of the USA has about 22.4 billion barrels’ worth of oil*. And there are developing nations, such as China (24 billion barrels)*, who also have minimal reserves who will pay more for oil and will get it. Which, in turn, will continue their economic growth to the point that they might just catch up and sprint past the USA.

*-figures derived from The Christian Science Monitor and Energy Information Agency/Oil and Gas Journal

8) If there is a famine or other natural catastrophe in the world, we will not "interfere." They can pray to Allah or whomever, for seeds, rain, cement or whatever they need. Besides most of them know that what we give them is stolen or given to the army.
The people who need it most get very little, if anything.

It’s a good thing we are a God-less nation then, or this kind of spitting in the eye of Jesus’ teachings about Christian generosity would seem wrong, even hypocritical. No Good Samaritans we?

Because our generosity is little rewarded, we should deprive the people that we have managed to help of our aid?

And lest we forget another of the New Testament parables, consider the story of the widow and the two coins—Luke 21 for anyone who wants to look it up:

3 And [Jesus] said, "Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; 4 for they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all the living that she had."

I doubt Australia can plead poverty, but they pledged nearly $820 million in relief to the victims of the 2004 tsunami. The US offered less than the World Bank initially—only $35 million—and then upped it to $950 million. So dear, it seems, until you consider the following:

GDP Australia: $642.7 billion*
GDP USA: $12.37 trillion*

A country with roughly 5% of our purchasing power not only managed to nearly match our overall contributions as a country, they offered up front nearly twenty-five times more than the US. So much for our “interference,” such as it was. It would seem, then, that this is not a “plan” for our future involvement in humanitarian aid but our current policy. We ought to be ashamed.

*numbers derived from 2005 estimates on the Central Intelligence Agency’s website

9) Ship the UN Headquarters to an isolated island someplace. We don't need the spies and fair weather friends here. Besides, the building would make a good homeless shelter or lockup for illegal aliens.

At least make them pay their parking tickets first.

10) All Americans must go to charm and beauty school. That way, no one can call us "Ugly Americans" any longer.

Beware: beauty is not a trait restricted to physical appearance. Nor is ugliness the sole purvey of the face.

11) The Language we speak is ENGLISH...learn it...or LEAVE...

Amendment 1 of the US Constitution:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Technically, insisting upon an English-language fluency and/or literacy counteracts the freedom of speech because it restricts your ability to communicate as you see fit. Since speaking in Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, or Chinese does not harm anyone, you are allowed to speak it freely (and since the numbers of people who speak those languages rival or even dwarf the numbers that speak English, it might not be wise to poke them in the eye about it).

The Statue of Liberty is no longer
saying "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.
She's got a baseball bat and she's yelling, 'you want a piece of me?' "

Only if you consider her the property of New Jersey. They’re much more aggressive than the New Yorkers. Isn’t it funny that she was a gift from the French? Perhaps they hoped we might live up to the Constitution we drafted when they could not live up to their cries of “Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite!” in their own revolution. Go figure.

Beyond those logical arguments for why this “amusing” “plan” is disastrous global and national policy, I am concerned by the frivolity of the rest of these. I might also mention that “good ole’ boy” Saddam Hussein was once considered an ally of these United States and put in power as a check against radical Islam and Communism.*

I’m sure I’ll be similarly disbelieved if I bring up the concessions we make to unrestrained oil consumption--#6’s bit about drilling in Alaska and having the caribou “cope”—are what may lead us to ice caps melting and raising the sea level enough to threaten our—now to be guarded by all those troops we’re removing in #2—coastlines.**

But I do love a good debate. Better than just letting e-mails float away without proper discussion.

In God We Trust,

* Wikipedia, but the original source is history
**Science, The New York Times, et al.

Perhaps I'm laying on the religious stuff a bit thick, but you have to speak the same language as those you disagree with sometimes before they'll admit you know what you're talking about.