14 February

Refugee Child: Thanks For The Pink Comforter. “It Keeps Me Warm”

by Jon Katz
Refugee Child

My donation today: A pre-paid LG smartphone: $39.99

A refugee child – she lost everything, his friends, family, toys, house and room – sent me this photograph.

She asks me to thank you for her pink comforter, the blanket underneath it, , the new socks, toys and underwear on top of it. Your donations from the Amazon Refugee Gift Page set up by the U.S. Committee on Refugees And Immigration made this picture possible, and warmed the heart and life of a helpless and innocent child.

She is no threat to you, your family, or America.

She was just cold, and is now warm.

You are keeping the torch lit, you cannot imagine the good you are doing for people and families whose only crime is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is how we judge our humanity, and how history will judge us. Today, I embrace my patriotic duty as a lover of America and a lover of liberty.

I want my granddaughter Robin to know what I did when these battered people came to our shores in search of refuge. I want her to know we sent them comforters, blankets, toys and socks, coffee pots, spoons, bowls and soccer balls. Smart phones, too.

You have let his child see that we are a generous and welcoming people, that the heart and soul of American remains just and compassionate and open. She feels safer because of you, and may learn to love America, not to fear it. The small and angry people want to send her back to a life of horror and hopelessness. I do not believe they will succeed.

A society that will take no risks to help others is barren at the core. You have touched this child with your heart.

I believe in the moral principles on which our country and government were founded. “What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man!,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “who can endure toil,famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment..inflict on his fellow-men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he arose in a rebellion to oppose.”

Jefferson is really writing about hypocrisy, of course, also know as the vice of vices. The criminal troubles us, but only the hypocrite is rotten to the core, because he or she so readily rationalizes and justifies inflicting on others what he would never tolerate or accept on himself.

It is simple and inexpensive to show up and vote for our values, for our decency, for compassion, one of our greatest national moral principles. Just go to the refugee gift page. If we have no peace, said Mother Teresa, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. Compassion is the basis of morality.

On the Amazon gift page,  you can see scores of items, ranging from a $2 prayer mat,  to Amazon gift cards,  to a set of school backpacks for $169. You have been so generous, filling the refugee warehouses with your gifts. But more people are arriving every day, the ones would have been banned from coming if the courts had not intervened.

Your donations have filled the USCRI warehouse more than once. Perhaps we can do it again.

The need is greater than ever. These people came legally, were investigated repeatedly, and have suffered terribly. They are coming into a cruel winter, the first in their lives. And they are coming under a fearful cloud they never expected.

If you can help them, please go here and choose your donation, there is no better way to start the day, I am grateful for the chance to give.

This gift page is a daily sacrament for me, it offers me the opportunity to be a true patriot,  to vigorously support my country and the values on which I believe it was founded. Freedom, freedom, freedom. I feel good every time I sent something to these people, it is a way to vote for America every day.

Today, I vote for a pre-paid smart phone, nothing is more essential in America. It costs $39.95.

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