It's time to dust off the old blog. There's some crazy stuff going on out there these days and I might as well try to add my voice to the madness. Let's start off with the latest hot topic.

“That evil wretched Trump! How dare he rip children from the arms of their parents!”

If you’ve visited a social media site recently you’ve no doubt found this sentiment expressed repeatedly. It’s the latest cause of the moment. Let’s assume for a moment that these parents and children were Americans accused of breaking the law. How would they be treated? Would they be separated from their children? Oh, yeah. It happens every day here in the good old USA. Talk to the police, social service workers, foster care folks, etc. It’s a routine event here in America. If you’re accused of breaking the law and sent to prison awaiting trial, your children aren’t just turned loose on the street. If there was no relative available to care for the child, the child ends up in foster care. We don’t send the kids of parents accused of a crime to prison with their parents. That silly old Constitution limits the government’s ability to imprison American citizens and American children are citizens. Our prisons aren’t exactly ideal places to raise children. If you think they are, then you haven’t been in a prison lately.

So, if you’re an American citizen accused of committing a crime, the evil old government will rip your children away from your arms. Why should it be different for illegal immigrants? Why should they have more rights than Americans?

“But this is different! All they did was come here illegally to better provide for their family!” Hey, maybe the only reason a bank robber robbed a bank was to better provide for his/her family. That burglar the police caught making off with your jewelry? He was just doing it to make money, so he could provide for his family. It’s cruel to rip his children from his arms. Why’s it different?

“But they have a bus fitted with child seats just for transporting those children!” You’d rather they threw them into the back of a pickup truck? They’re children and you must transport them safely. ICE arrests tend to be made in clusters, so you end up with a lot of people detained at one time, including a lot of children. Ferrying each child individually would be more burdensome. We don’t transport each adult separately, nor do we transport each child separately. They are however transported safely.

“They’ve lost track of fifteen hundred kids! They don’t even know where they are!” Welcome to the reality of foster care. Kids have this annoying habit of running away from foster care homes. When they run away they tend not to leave forwarding addresses. That kind of defeats the whole purpose of running away. The kids are trying to get away and escape the system. They don’t tell the system where they’re going. That’s typically how you lose track of kids in the system.

“Some of those poor children have ended up in the hands of pedophiles!” True. As do some of the American kids put in foster care. Very few pedophiles advertise that they are pedophiles, so children can be placed in homes that are unsuitable. It happens. Unless you can develop a pedophile detector that’s a hundred percent reliable it will continue to happen.

People seem to have lost their minds lately. Hyperbole is the new norm and it’s getting more than a bit crazy. Nothing is really happening with the children of illegal immigrants that doesn’t happen everyday with American children. Having a child isn’t a “get out of jail free” card. We rip kids from the arms of American parents hundreds of times a day.

“Well, it’s wrong!” I’m not saying it’s the greatest thing, but if the parents break the law you can’t just ignore their lawbreaking. They’ve got to be held accountable and sadly, it’s the kids who often suffer. If all of those screaming about this situation opened their homes to foster kids and gave them warm loving homes to shelter them until they could be reunited with their parents, it would make the situation much better. Sadly, that won’t happen. This is now a political issue and common sense and logic don’t apply to political issues. 

“Those poor kids!” They don’t care about the kids. They care about the issue. They want to use it as a political bludgeon. If they cared about the children, they’d become foster parents and work to help the children. They could give them a safe home, a warm bed, a comfortable living, a good education. Most of the celebrities jumping on this issue could easily afford to take in five, ten or more foster children and take nothing from the states. They could give these children a life the kids could only dream of. But, they won’t. They don’t truly care about the kids. They care about using this as a divisive political issue. Welcome to America kids. You’re the latest pawns in a political battle. Have fun being in the middle of this insane tug of war.

As for the rest of us, we'll continue to get bombarded with the latest spin on this. No doubt the authorities will be accused of torturing children soon. "They're sticking them with needles!" Yeah, it's called a vaccination. Our foster care system is far from perfect, but the current hyperbole related to illegal immigrant children is really getting out of hand. I try to keep things in perspective and when you realize that what's happening with immigrant children is exactly what happens with American children whose parents are accused of committing a crime, it tends to balance things out a bit.

If you like this blog and want more of my common sense view on things, feel free to subscribe. If you think I'm an apologist for Trump, feel free to ignore it. Things are getting interesting with lots of investigations ongoing and some wrapping up, so I'll be posting a bit more frequently over the next few weeks/months. I try to keep things relatively spin free and in perspective and that's not something that's easy to find these days.