It’s time to fact check the Statue of Liberty
Jun 15, 2018, 5:56 AM
(File, AP Photo/Mel Evans)
(File, AP Photo/Mel Evans)
The mainstream media is always fact-checking the president and is again beating him up over his policy of temporarily separating refugees from their children at the southern border.
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Well, I would suggest it’s time to fact check the underlying assumptions here. It’s time to fact check the Statue of Liberty, and not just to fact check, but demand a correction before another generation grows up believing it.
We’ve all heard the poem: “Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand / Glows world-wide welcome…”
It stirred hearts in 1883, but to an unsentimental fact-checker in 2018? Pants on fire.
“Give me your tired, your poor”? No. “Give me your fired up entrepreneurs” might be true, but “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free?” Not even close.
We should realize this is nothing new.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who I don’t think anyone would classify as a conservative, turned away a ship carrying German Jewish people fleeing extermination. Why? Because a German spy – a single German spy – was caught masquerading as a refugee.
My Italian grandmother used to take me to the Statue of Liberty as a kid. She took me even when she was too old to make it all the way to the top.
But then you grow up and you learn that poetry isn’t policy, not in my grandmother’s America, and not now.
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