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This first-person pronoun I have a problem with. Our girls? How are they yours, Ma’am? Who are the “we” you derived that “our” from? Obviously not “we Americans,” since so far as I can determine the missing lasses are all Nigerian citizens. “We negroes”? No, it can’t possibly be the case that Mrs. Obama is that ethnocentric. Unthinkable! “We progressive women of the world” is probably closer to what the First Lady’s thinking.
That would be fair enough but for the fact that Mrs. Obama is the First Lady. That makes it appear that by referring to the kidnappees as “our girls” she sees them as being the concern of the United States, which they are not and should not be.
Private citizens of a humanitarian inclination may feel distressed for the kidnapped girls, and should of course do anything lawful they can think of to help them; but this is not government business — not unless you think everything is government business, in which case you have plenty of company but the company doesn’t include me.
No doubt dire things are happening to schoolgirls all over the world, not just in Nigeria but in North Korea, Nicaragua, Namibia, and Nepal too. There are charities you can subscribe to for helping them; but if you think it’s the business of our federal government, you’d better pony up for a whole lot more federal government to take care of it all.
The New York Post, which used to be a sensible newspaper, is on board with Mrs. Obama’s possessive pronoun. Quote from their editorial:
“These terrified girls in Nigeria have become our girls. And if we don’t regard them the same way we would 300 girls from Brooklyn or Chicago who had been abducted from their school by Islamist terrorists, the horrors we see in Africa today will become America’s horror tomorrow.”
Good grief! I’m supposed to regard Nigerian schoolgirls with the same concern I’d have for American schoolgirls? I flatly refuse to do so. In fact I refuse to give a damn about what people in the Third World are doing to each other unless it impacts my country’s national interests in some obvious way. Screw the Third World.As for “the horrors we see in Africa today will become America’s horror tomorrow,” they might, if we’re such fools as to let crazy Islamists into our country. Which, as a matter of fact, we are, via our feckless immigration policies and fraud-riddled “refugee resettlement“ programs.
If you let all the world’s crazy lunatics come settle in your country, then yes, other countries’ crazy-lunatic problems will become your problems, and Mrs. Obama and the New York Post editorialists will have a point. The solution is sensible, strict immigration policies. Will the New York Post editorialize for that? Will Mrs. Obama hold up a card for that? Don’t hold your breath.