It’s surprising American students are allowed to study abroad because everyone knows we’re all gun-toting lunatics that pack heat while going to church and school. Right now my buddy Noah is studying abroad in Holland and I’m sure he’s hatching a plan to run amuck with his fully automatic assault rifle that he had stowed in his luggage. He is American and isn’t that what we’re all like? We’ve grown up in a country where a mass shooting takes place every week with such regularity, it’s like taco night.
But yet a large portion of the doughy mass that makes up America assumes people who come from Muslim countries are terrorists. This is worse than ignorant; it’s mental. There are religious nut jobs in every faith, just look at the white trigger-happy whackos of the Bible Belt that make up a surprising bulk of this country.
Syrians don’t have a culture like ours where there’s a mass shooting every week. If they did they wouldn’t be fleeing their country trying to escape it. Americans stay put and carry on with their lives in the midst of extreme violence because killing each other is normal to us. Our country was founded on the blood of other people, so now when someone shoots up a school it’s news for a week then on to the next. We live with bloodshed while others flee it. This is not an admirable trait to me. It’s sick how normalized mass shootings have become in this country.
It should be common knowledge that immigrants come to this country for a better life. They’re not out to get us. In a land of such excess we have more than enough to provide the means to people who have nothing. The argument that 10,000 Syrians living here would make our country less safe is laughable. We’ve had two mass shootings in less than a week and the nutters seem to be gearing up for a big holiday bloodletting.
If you’ve ever traveled abroad to a non-white country, some things become apparent rapidly: Other humans are just like you. Most folks are nice and want to help you. They want a means to provide a good life for their family. This isn’t radical stuff here. It should be common knowledge but yet this pervasive attitude of xenophobia exists because Americans stay at home with their televisions watching people who talk funny blow each other up, while ignoring the Christian Jim Bobs of our country killing each other.
Even Maine this summer had multiple mass shootings. Stunned neighbors stand in their dooryards and issue statements like, “I don’t know what happened. They seemed like such nice people. He just snapped.” And it goes on and on.
So I urge you to go abroad and leave your guns at home. Americans need to get out and see how the rest of the world lives. Numbers are sketchy but something like only 20% of Americans have passports and the majority of them just go to our white neighbor to the north. I’d feel much safer in Paris, France than I would in Paris, Texas any day of the week. Plus them Frogs know how to live: Socialized medicine, stinky cheese, and 2 Euro bottles of wine? I’m drooling already.
Would you like some help with airfare?