Refugee Paradox

The economy of crisis has at its godhead the looming effects of protoindustrial culture. Rebranded PSAs by focus groups to address a predicted catastrophe to come. Climate Change like Ukraine shares the same result: displaced peoples needing resources and new homes. The most effective martial art is parkour because running to safety is superior to fighting when faced with fight or flight. Even if the left doesn’t support stand your ground when it comes to personal defense they support sending defensive weapons to Ukraine. We do not celebrate deserters but we should and maybe this is why refugees have nowhere to go.

When the world trade center towers fell there were people who instead of running away were filming. We celebrate them by airing their footage when running away is what we should encourage. Not to demean the heroes that at risk to their own health rescued people but the ability to run away when needed is clutch to the human condition.

The left weaponizes the idea of refugees but the United States is accepting 100k refugees from Ukraine dwarfed by the influx of “defensive” weapons. Just like climate change where the debate is dominated by hegemonic forces and the end result is neocolonialism where NGOs try to solve the third world’s climate impacts. Refugees are more than porn for liberal elites to find their hate again. The rising of tides that is projected means less land to live on. There is also a global food shortage on the rise especially because of the present conflict and rising prices of wheat.

In the states we frame a homeless crisis starting by the Reagan administration’s closures of federally funded mental homes. But that ignores the American history of economic migration that has been pervasive in any era. If the 60s were depression era nostalgia commodified, as Ken Burns suggests, then maybe the nomadic hobo still lives in the American consciousness.

The Treaty of Hidalgo that ended the Mexican American War divided 7 tribes that lived between the two nations – the Yaqui / Yoeme, the O’odham, the Cocopah / Cucapá, the Kumeyaay / Kumiai, the Pai, the Apaches, and the Kickapoo / Kikapú. Before 9/11 indigenous people could cross border unimpeded or that was the way it was supposed to work. “In. 1983, Congress passed the Texas Band of Kickapoo Act, which ensured that. Kickapoo could freely cross the border into Mexico and return at will…”

The situation on our southern border should disqualify us as a moral authority on refugees. I feel guilty of my privileged cold-war-darling immigration status but not grateful for being uprooted. Apparently POC are being put into refugee camps in Poland filling me with shame but not surprise. During the Trump administration immigrant veterans like myself were being deported some of whom still haven’t found their way back. You would think that serving in the military cements your naturalized citizenship but criminality has often been used as justification for deportation. When I was a sailor you would get a medal every three years for good behavior. It was hard to not get into trouble in that environment.

We have to make a decision whether we care more about people or land because land is shrinking. Black bodies are being drowned in the English Channel while settler mentality welcomes Ukrainians with open arms. Settler mentality prioritizes land over people, standing your ground over flight, using lethal force to protect prosperity, from the indigenous it was stolen from.

Europeans stole wealth from Asia and Africa as a matter of standard practice. Collective consciousness stirred by a calibanesque ungrateful incubus drowning in the channel or the Rio Grande feeding an en masse conception of crime. The framing of the climate crisis gaslight reparations for the wholesale transfer of wealth that is colonial history.