Crisis of Compassion

We are treated almost daily to the spectacle of American citizens blocking busses full of central American immigrant children from potential refuges.   Where is the compassion so often attributed to our country.  I guess the inscription on the Statue of Liberty has reached its expiration date.  What many of the yahoos protesting the influx of minors don't know or don't realize is the conditions they are fleeing were made possible by the policies of previous administrations, most notably St. Ronald Reagan.  Operatives from that White House armed the death squads who made life a precarious commodity in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.  The drug trade which thrives in those nations today is the lineal descendant of those same policies.  Our de facto support of heavy handed dictators in these "banana republics" have made the current flood of refugees inevitable as parents gamble their children will have a better chance of survival in "Del Norte" than in their own countries.  We need to acknowledge this connection and help improve conditions in the countries of Central America.  In the short term, we must help these children, not by shipping them back to deprivation and possible death, but showing them that perhaps we are that "shining city on a hill" that the author of so much of this present day suffering once described.