You Don't Have To Live Like A Refugee

So, I'm watching the news the other night and they're promising a story of domination of the human spirit in time of war, a story of a harrowing escape from war torn Lebanon to Seattle.

A brief summary of the story: As missiles fall closer and closer to her home, a mother makes the brave decision to bundle her children together and get them out of Lebanon. She manages the soul crushing journey back to her original home in Seattle after a journey full of hardships that pit her against the very reserves of her endurance.

The home that this mother escaped from, the home that I imagined as a modest and cramped dwelling, was literally a palace. The newscaster even referred to it as a palace. The pictures they showed of it proved that it was a palace - the sort of gaudy exercise in excess that is shameful. And the awful journey this plastic surgery showroom and her children had to endure? Well, they took a boat to Cypress. Oh, and it was a rough crossing. The part of this journey that brought the family to the brink of survival is that there were people getting seasick.

There was probably also the issue of not being able to get all the kids and their nannies into first class on the flight over. Yeah, did I mention that on this refugee flight, where the family barely escaped with their lives, they also brought along their 2 nannies.

Okay.

Admittedly, if British Columbia started tossing missiles down on Seattle I'd bust a move on out of here and quickly find an audience to share my hardships with (like having to leave behind my recently found copy of the out of print Silver by The Wrens). Hell, I think there should be a news report on me every time I walk back home from Safeway with a big box of kitty litter hurting my fingers. And just because you're rich, it certainly doesn't make the horrors of war any less horrific than it does for the poor.

But, by painting your mildly discomforting trip away from your bountiful riches as something akin to Jews fleeing Europe in the 30's you make a mockery of the poor people who are actually facing real hardship or actually dying. It's like people who claim that their little accessory, child replacement, purse dogs are service animals and then scream that they are being discriminated against when told that animals aren't allowed in a restaurant. You're spitting in the face of people who have actually had to fight against discrimination, you selfish whore.

And a lot of this can be blamed, once again, on the news station that feels they must make everything hyper dramatic to keep the attention of those deficient in attention. I mean they have to keep selling those commercial slots for gas guzzling ginormo-trucks and chemical rich packets of goo that keep you from having the scrape the food off your plates before putting them into an automatic dish washer.

I am definitely in need of some more coffee. And a pep talk from Mel Gibson…