Posted on 12/07/2003 3:32:47 PM PST by Holly_P
Elian Gonzalez, who floated in Florida's waters four years ago on Thanksgiving, was 10 years old yesterday. The media spectacle that surrounded his arrival and departure has given way to obscurity; the world has forgotten Elian.
Those who ignore Elian's legacy may be driven by guilt: Most Americans opposed granting him asylum in America and their complete repudiation of the Statue of Liberty's Emma Lazarus poem was accompanied by unrelenting assurances that he would live like he owned a sugar plantation (if ownership were allowed in communist Cuba) or that he would become a media celebrity (if media were allowed). Elian, for anyone bothering to account for the child whose mother died coming to America, has disappeared, though he occasionally appears on state-run television in his communist uniform. The public won and moved on. Elian lost his freedom -- and America lost its way.
Each branch of government rejected Elian's right to live in liberty. The legislative branch refused to consider making Elian a citizen, though exceptions had been made for Vietnam's Boat People, for Cuba's Mariel boatlift, for Cuba's Operation Peter Pan and for generations of Mexicans, all of which included children. Congress granted no such exclusion to arbitrary immigration laws for the smallest minority: the individual.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Elian's plea for asylum, made on his behalf by Elian's Uncle Lazaro, an auto mechanic who fed, clothed and housed the child at his two-bedroom home in Little Havana. Though Elian's defenders failed to make the case for his asylum on principle, his Miami family stood against a judicial system that had fundamentally betrayed its founding principle: individual rights.
The nation's most powerful official approved the initiation of force. On April 22, 2000, President Clinton, backed by the public and by each branch of government -- executive, judicial, legislative -- dispatched gun-toting agents to seize Elian, marking the first time America's government forced a child from a free society and returned him to a dictatorship. The conviction that it is better to live in the land of the free than to live under tyranny had been abandoned.
Educated by modern intellectuals, Americans had become ignorant of life under communism. Throughout Elian's saga, people expressed disbelief that life in Cuba includes no right to property, association, travel or speech. Elian, they insisted, belongs with his father. Whether father and son lived in freedom or slavery was judged irrelevant: What mattered to most Americans was that the two blood relatives were bound together -- even if it meant they would be gagged by a dictatorship -- and, anyway, they chortled, communism in Cuba couldn't be that bad.
Over three years later, not one reporter has been permitted to observe his condition unmolested by communist agents. Elian Gonzalez is fully enslaved and unseen, except when he is used by Cuba's dictatorship as a pawn for propaganda.
Yet it is America that has suffered for its philosophical inversion. As government agents were snatching Elian, Islamic terrorists, living illegally in Florida, were busy plotting the worst attack in U.S. history -- an attack that would probably have been stopped had the government enforced its laws. Forcing a child to return to slavery while our enemies were miles away planning the most diabolical act of war offers proof that America has lost any sense of what matters. A free republic that refuses to judge its enemies while spurning a child refugee from tyranny is doomed by its own contradictions.
As America approaches its third Christmas at war, we must restore the idea of inalienable individual rights to a sacred place in our hearts. There is no better time to do so than Christmas, which still represents benevolence, redemption and the notion that children should bask in the light of joy, not totalitarianism.
We can start by recognizing that a truly happy birthday -- a celebration of one's life and future -- is impossible for anyone living under communism and by acknowledging that nothing -- not family, not tradition, not religion -- is more important than an individual's freedom. It is why the enemy hates us -- and it is why Elian should be celebrating his birthday in America.
Scott Holleran (scottholleran@mac.com), a freelance writer in southern California, was the first reporter permitted into the Gonzalez family¹s Miami, Fla., home, where Holleran met Elian Gonzalez and wrote about the encounter for several American newspapers.
Huh? Is this writer sure about this?
Noo. A commie woulda kept the child even though the child's father was doing everything in his power to get his son back. Because a commie doesn't care one shred about individuals or familly when the interests of the state and other people are in conflict.
Freedom is where you can make your own mistakes, and within reason, raise your child as you wish without the interference of the miami cuban community or the US government.
Once his mother had died and his father asserted parental rights, keeping him would have been kidnapping by any definition. The US has NEVER recognized freedom as being a better condition than the familly. You will have to provide several court cases and precidents in order to back up that statement, and I seriously doubt you can because the US just doesn't operate that way where there is no immenent possibility of child abuse.
And you're a dupe for propaganda, as well.
Elian blew out his candles and Fidel made a notoriously long speech.
A short speech by the communist blow hard would be about 6 hours.
LOL. That's like saying a parent can never lose parental rights. What Clinto & Janet Reno did to Elian was unforgivable.
Luis it's all yours, I can't go through this rerun again.
The US was remarkably consistant in his return. The people of the US have always and consistantly supported the familly and there's just no way to convince them or me that returning the child to his father was a bad thing. If his mother had lived then we'd be having a different discussion and chances are the boy would still be in the US.
Like I say, the US system is designed to protect the familly against outside interference from people like you. The state can not go into a home and rip a child away from his parents (in cases where the child is not being abused) because the state disagrees with how he is being raised.
Not one judge in this country will give YOU a voice in the court to say Elian should be ripped away from his biological father because YOU disagree with the father's politcis. And thank God for that.
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