It's not really a "caravan," is it?
Those thousands of desperate migrants walking across
This crowd can be called many things, but "caravan" isn't one of them.
The approach of the desperate thousands from
And there's one thing about silence.
"Chi tace acconsente," says my barber,
And so, whatever you call this, it may just be the event that finally compels Americans to think long and hard about why a sovereign nation would even bother to have borders at all.
But calling the mass of people moving through
Depending on your politics, you've probably already called it something. Or, you may have followed the example of Democratic leaders
Wasn't it just months ago that leading Democratic presidential contenders were demanding to abolish the federal
Those were the days when the hard left that now controls the Democratic Party made it clear that border enforcement, by its nature, was racist and lacked compassion.
And their allies in the
But now, it's crickets from the
"We are a generous and welcoming people," insisted then-Sen.
That sounds remarkably like
And now we talk of "caravans."
Doesn't a "caravan" involve camels and spices, resting at some oasis, quietly munching figs in the shade against a sweeping old-
A caravan can be festive: old gypsy women telling fortunes, copper pots clanging from the back of wagons, picaresque rogues stealing into towns for adventures, stories told by campfire light, accordion music, dancing.
The Irish Travelers have had caravans. As have the Karakachani, nomads who demonstrated their horsemanship outside small Greek villages when my father was a boy.
Americans have had caravans, too, with Conestoga wagons pulled by heavy oxen across the American West, the pioneers searching for just the right spot for a little house on the prairie.
In our fiction, at least, caravans are romantic. But this seems different, doesn't it?
More insistent, hungry and recalling in form, if not scope, the wave of migrants of North Africans and Syrians into
And what we see on television is a wave of human misery from
Legally, or illegally, it really doesn't matter to them.
History tells us that immigration bureaucracy is a luxury that masses of desperate refugees can't afford, and whether Dorians, Goths or Seljuks, and so on through the ages, refugees will try to find a way.
Trump tells the nation he will stop them at the border. The left says he is stoking fear. Perhaps, a bit, but
Given how
By sticking their heads in the sand, Pelosi and Schumer tell their Democratic colleagues to simply ignore what voters are seeing on their TV screens every night.
"The president is desperate to change the subject from health care to immigration because he knows that health care is the number one issue Americans care about," they said in a statement the other day. "
You won't be diverted? That's your business.
While
Chi tace acconsente. The silence of the
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John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who also hosts a radio show on WLS-AM.