2015.11.21 Opening our heart to the refugees

[rva_jeremy]

You cannot naively accept unlimited numbers of people to exploit your social programs, especially if you know their culture is heavily biased against your inherent values.

I agree, but this is the logic of imperialism, as you pointed out here:

I think the most effective solution would be to accept our culpability in enabling a criminal imperial government to destroy the middle east and then direct aid to help rebuild what we ruined. That would be the most practical way of loving people.

Western nations have erected a global system of neoliberal economics that thrives on the ability to move capital at will but keep labor trapped within made-up borders. At what point are those social systems not simply something we did right for ourselves, but instead a kind of excess we enjoy at the expense of the third world? Isn't it the borders, those made up lines on the map, that make any of this inequity comprehensible and thinkable at all? And aren't the institutions that create these conditions based on documents and principles "of no authority?"

I would prefer that we naively accept unlimited numbers of people because I hold the naïveté is with those who think our present system can possibly continue like this. As Eisenstein says in The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, there are no practical solutions to our problems anymore--or rather, there are plenty of practical solutions but no political mandate to act upon them and therefore no reason to see our institutions behave in any manner we'd approve of, either way.

That means we have crossed the threshold into the impractical solutions by necessity, leaving behind everything that we think of as "practical". Indeed, I'd argue we're headed straight for a global situation where clever political arrangements that placate people--and make the inequities of our system stable--are breaking down. It's not going to be a matter of doing the smart vs. the naive thing; it's going to be a matter of doing the open-hearted naive thing vs. the close-hearted naive thing. While I sometimes wish I had more political agency in this matter, in the end I have all the agency I require to make use of this third density experience.

To folks on all sides of this question: consider the notion that we as individuals have next to zero say on this policy matter in the first place. Taking in all the refugees, as some in this thread suggest, is no more possible for us than changing the foreign policy as you suggest, Spooner. Given that none of us has any leverage in the institutions making and executing these decisions, who cares if we can individually think up the right total solution to the problem in some abstract, intellectually satisfying sense? We didn't start the fire, and we certainly don't have a big enough extinguisher.

Therefore, it's neither here nor there whether the policies are correct from any perspective; the only question is how we're going to think it, and how that thinking affects our actions. Do we wish to serve, or do we wish to solve the puzzle? I guess there's some symbolic catalyst in considering the matter from the policy perspective, but what we practice and the thinking informing that practice is so much more relevant, isn't it, in the personal drama of incarnation we face?