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.
That photo just rips my heart.
I totally forgot that point. Thanks for reminding me. I wonder if Elian gets to see his dad?
Oh, yes as to Elian Gonzalez, there is more than fifteen minutes in all of his story. We will hear of him in years to come.
Let us remember that he is an "Elegua" a blessed child saved from the sea by dolphins.
Al Gore is going to endorse Dean? We have more work to do on our story.
"He sneered at her like a cat who had left an unwelcome present in her shoe. 'Well' he said, looks like maybe your pet monkey will have to get himself a real job soon instead of stealing money from our party'. 'Losers only back losers, chump' she hissed like a cobra ready to strike. 'The Party's mine you fool; my machine, my engine, my big ride, and no maple syrup boy is going to push me out'" Back to you,
Regards, Hey Jeff!! Look who's here!
Do a Google search on the name Walter Polovchak.
If you don't know how to do that, then go here and see how Elián's case would have been handled with a conservative in the White House.
Last but not least...how comfortable are you on your convictions when in order for you to believe that the right thing was done in the case of Elián Gonzalez, you must believe that Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Janet Reno, The National Council of Churches, and Fidel Castro all took a stand in the name of parental rights, and that you stood with them?
"I remember at the time that ADM, an international corporation, was interested in some sugar contracts."
Go to post #73 on this thread.
the great inconvenienceJVB!!! You're gonna shame me into finishing that story, ain'tya? It'll be, friend, it'll be.
Meanwhile, great to see you whackos. Sorry I can't make the Xmas party. Kisses to all.
Elian's mother DIED trying to get her son away from Castro's Cuban hell-hole only to have Clinton and Reno do a favor for that scumbag lawyer Gregg (as well as for that athiest, Democrat-front, "Church" organization) by delivering Elian right back to Castro's Cuban hell-hole.
"Sorry, Mom - - you died for NOTHING."
I think I'll post that nauseating photo again.
Are you familiar with FReeper Jeff Head's five-book future-oriented fictional series, Dragon's Fury?
Just a little piece of info on the plot thread that runs through one of the five volumes: There is a young Cuban man who plays a prominent role as a freedom-fighter in Cuba in the not-too-distant future. Bet you can't guess his name. :)
Although the book is a work of fiction, born of meticulous research so as to make its plot entirely (frighteningly) possible, it provides a little solace for those of us whose hearts still break when we think of Elian. It is somehow comforting to know, even though the salve is applied through a work of fiction, that he achieves through his own efforts what we were unwilling to allow him to achieve when it was within our power to do so.
~ joanie
P.S. Thanks for the latest info on your Taft book. The venerable Ms. Kimes' 'This is simply a wonderful book
. Its scholarship is impeccable, and the tale told is fascinating' is quite a tribute! (I would imagine you are, understandably, still walking about three inches off the ground? :)
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