{"id":11737,"date":"2015-11-23T22:31:30","date_gmt":"2015-11-23T22:31:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=11737"},"modified":"2015-11-23T22:31:30","modified_gmt":"2015-11-23T22:31:30","slug":"we-are-a-nation-of-refugees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=11737","title":{"rendered":"We are a nation of refugees"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n

\"founders\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The debate over how — or whether — to welcome refugees to our land is continuing at full throttle.<\/p>\n

It is dismaying to hear talk from\u00a0presidential candidates that we should slam the door shut on Syrians — or Muslims — out of fear that some of them might be terrorists intent on harming Americans.<\/p>\n

President Obama has declared several times, “That’s not who we are.”<\/p>\n

Well, who are we?<\/p>\n

By my reckoning, we are a nation founded and built by refugees.<\/em><\/p>\n

You’ve learned about these individuals. They sailed to the New World to flee religious and political oppression. They came here in search of a new life. They encountered the indigenous population here and were met with mixed feelings by their new “hosts.”<\/p>\n

The refugees persevered throughout most of the 17th century and into the 18th century. They rebelled eventually against the empire from which they had fled. They launched a revolution. The fighting ended in 1781 and a nation was created.<\/p>\n

Those refugees then crafted a government built on a document that specified certain things. One of them would be that they would apply no religious test for those seeking political office.<\/p>\n

However, some politicians today actually have said in the current climate that people of a certain religion are not “qualified” to seek public office. That’s not who we are, either.<\/p>\n

Do we intend to live in fear? Are we doing to forsake the very principles on which those first refugees founded this great nation?<\/p>\n

How about we take a break, look inward at just who we are as a people — as a nation?<\/p>\n

How might those first refugees think of what has happened to their descendants and their reaction to world events?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n\n

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The debate over how — or whether — to welcome refugees to our land is continuing at full throttle. It is dismaying to hear talk from\u00a0presidential candidates that we should slam the door shut on Syrians — or Muslims — out of fear that some of them might be terrorists intent on harming Americans. President … Continue reading We are a nation of refugees<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[368,1782,3168,3875,5648,4489,4569],"class_list":["post-11737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international-news","tag-american-revolution","tag-founding-fathers","tag-muslims","tag-refugees","tag-religious-oppressio","tag-syria","tag-terrorists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11737"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11739,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11737\/revisions\/11739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}