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"CHANGE" IS IN THE AIR.....BUT BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH (OR VOTE) FOR!

The idea that America needs to “change” is all the rage—it’s sweeping MANY citizens, especially among those too young to have significant experience of anywhere but their own country.  But, “change” to what?  Shouldn’t we have a clear idea of where we’re headed before we set off?  And change AWAY from what?  Wouldn’t it make sense to do some comparisons of important aspects of this country in relation to those same aspects of the countries we’re expected to become more like?

Well, I think so.

Here’s a description of a bunch of kids, who became “the Fugees”, now living near me in Georgia......

They’re war refugees from 24 countries, every nightmare on earth. Most had spoken no English when they arrived in America. They’d been placed in classrooms according to their age rather than their reading level and left to wither. Most of their families had been shattered, their fathers killed, imprisoned or divorced because a single mother had a better chance to get a visa out of hell ... and God knows what marauding armies had done to some of those mothers. Several Fugees had fought as child soldiers in Liberia. One had seen his father gunned down by soldiers, another had seen his dad’s fingers sliced off. One had watched rebels give his brother a gun and a choice: Kill yourself or your best friend. Then he’d watched his brother blow the friend away.

It would be fairly easy to take a dim view of the U.S. of A. when you read what happened to these kids after they arrived......

Resettlement agencies had covered their parents’ rent and utilities during their first three months in America, along with providing some furniture, canned goods and food stamps. Then they’d been left, with no car or education or language skills, to support families of five or six while earning the minimum wage as maids or just a little more as laborers in a chicken factory.

It wasn’t paradise for their children, either. Some were confined to their apartments, forbidden to go outside when their parents discovered that gang members and drug users sometimes made their new hometown—Clarkston, Ga., on the outskirts of Atlanta—nearly as unsettling as their old one.

But, if you stopped there, you’d be missing the real story.  These kids were found one day.  Found by a young woman in rebellion against her father, her family, and her privileges. 

Luma Mufleh from Amman, Jordan, a Muslim who grew up in a mansion as the daughter of a steel magnate named Hassan....Luma was looking for a home just as hard as every one of those lost boys on the spring day in 2004 when the Fugees, by accident, began. She was depressed, to be honest, and running out of ways to justify to her large and wealthy extended family why she hadn’t gone home for eight years, not for births or deaths or marriages.

And the cool thing was that on that day Luma didn’t only find her kids......she started down the road to finding herself, as well.  It was so simple, at first.

She took a left into an apartment complex, The Lakes, to turn around, and noticed 10 children, all foreign-looking, playing soccer in the parking lot. Bare feet on asphalt, tattered ball bouncing off cars, two rocks for a goal, no adults in sight.

It was as if she were seeing exactly what her heart yearned for but her stubborn, lonely quest had forbidden her: home. All those days of playing pickup soccer with her siblings, cousins and neighbors back in Jordan, laughing and arguing over every shot that hissed near their two-rock goal. She watched those ragtag kids from her yellow Volkswagen Beetle for an hour, then departed with a pang.

She returned at the same time a few days later with a lovely white ball, stepped out of her car and asked a bunch of kids, roughly a third her age, if she could play too.

They stared at her ball. That’s what they really wanted. They conferred and turned to Luma. O.K. She was in.

The kids had all played soccer since they could run....but they had never been coached, knew very little about the rules, and were totally undisciplined.  No matter.

She began harnessing the chaos. “She’s a girl! She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” sneered a 12-year-old from Sudan. At once Luma gathered her team—boys from countries where a woman wouldn’t dream of telling a man what to do—placed the Sudanese boy in front of the goal and lined up a penalty kick.

On all her youth and school teams (soccer, basketball, volleyball, softball and tennis) she’d been the best and fiercest player. She’d scored a hat trick to lead her jayvee girls’ soccer team to a 3--1 victory over the varsity boys, who—when they’d finished digesting their pride—presented to her a jersey with the words THE MAN across the back. “You’re not going to wear that, are you?” her father had cried.

“Sure I am,” she said, and did.

She took one step toward the ball, her right leg exploding like a karate chop—she’d taken that in high school too—and sent a BB past the Sudanese boy and into the goal. “Anyone else?” asked Luma. Nope. Nobody else.

From necessity, Luma morphed from coach to “American Mom”, helping the kids and their parents (whether single or couple) navigate the puzzle that is America to people with no experience.  Tutor, social worker, teacher, labor coach as well as soccer coach, drill instructor......

It shocked the Fugees, how the lady who wrapped an arm around them and listened to their woes, who understood just how it felt to start over in a faraway land, could stride onto the practice field and transform. If they tried to beg off running laps, claim their stomachs hurt, she’d bark, “Just fart!” If they tried to cut corners while doing sit-ups and push-ups, she’d explode. “If you’re going to clown in practice, don’t come! Go home! We don’t want the quitters coming! Do you want to test me today? You’ll run the hill for the rest of practice!”

....After all, they’d signed the Fugee contract: No smoking, drugs or alcohol—or no more Fugees. Miss a practice, miss a game. Miss two, goodbye! All progress reports and report cards went straight to Coach; C average minimum, or see ya! Five-absence limit per semester. Tutoring mandatory. No hair longer than Coach’s. Curse and it’s curtains.

....They’d come to Luma from long, frustrating days at school, exhaust themselves in her grueling 1 1/2-hour workouts, then pull their books from their backpacks for another hour and a half of tutoring, sometimes by flashlight on benches beside the field. Let all those relief-agency workers roll their eyes and tell her she was nuts to take on teenage refugee boys. Let others ache for them and give them excuses to fail. Not Luma. She’d show the depth of her respect for them by plumbing the depths of their resilience and character. She’d cut them no slack for the tragedy on their résumés, because she knew the world would not.

I’ll cut this short....after years of shoestring operation, someone told a reporter looking for a story about refugees, and suddenly lots of people wanted to help (you can too, of course—CHECK OUT THEIR WEBSITE).  The story of the Fugee Family was published in the New York Times, and suddenly Nike was there with equipment, uniforms and cash; Kroger sent money, an interested local woman provided their bus.......  All of this went into an expanded program, including both girls and boys and encompassing education and family assistance as well as sports. 

The reason this story is crucial in this election year comes right at the end of the article.  Read it carefully and take it in.  Don’t vote without a clear vision of how “change” will change the conditions that make it possible for this story to take place.  Here is the testimony of Luma Mufleh from Amman, Jordan - not one of the “America First” contingent, hardly the typical “booster” we hear about.

She’d gotten America wrong when she imagined it as a kid back in Jordan. It wasn’t like the shiny steel rods that came out of her father’s mill. It was like the piles of iron ore that went in, malleable enough so that if you really wanted to, if you had the heat, you could take a scoop of it and begin shaping it into what you wanted it to be.

“It’s not Utopia like it seemed in the movies and TV shows I’d seen growing up,” she says."But it’s the only place in the world where this could happen. So many people here have stepped forward to help. I couldn’t do this in any other country."

(emphasis added)

Get a hankie and READ THE WHOLE THING

Then, vote wisely. 

Posted by on 07/03 at 02:11 PM

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