give me a frickin' break

Today was going to be movie review day, but I hadn't had a chance to write the review yet. So I was going to write the review later and post an entry later in the day than I normally do.

And then I was browsing around the news and found this story about Elian Gonzalez.

You might remember Elian. When he was about 6 years old, his mother took him with her on a boat from Cuba to the States, and she was killed on the journey over. He survived, and his relatives living in Miami wanted custody of him. But his still-living father wanted him returned to Cuba, where the father lived. A U.S. Federal Court decided that the father was the one entitled to proper custody of him, and when the relatives refused to hand him over, he was forcibly removed by immigration agents and returned to his father in Cuba.

Sad story. Mom died, frightened child has no clue what's going on and probably had no idea of the political firestorm that surrounded him. Mom and Dad wanted him to live in different places. Who gets to choose? Well, if both were alive, I'm not sure how that would have worked. But with his mother unfortunately killed, there is no question left - Dad has custody. And add to that factor that at the time of Elian's arrival on U.S. soil, he was not a legal resident, so we're not even talking about the child of two parents who have citizenship in two different countries.

I know that conditions in Cuba are bad for a lot of people. I don't recall that Elian's family was particularly in danger, any more than anyone else in Cuba would have been. So does that mean that all cute six-year-old boys should have been allowed to come to the States from Cuba? What if they're seven? Can they still come? What if they're not quite as cute as Elian? Do they still get to come?

There are a lot of people in a lot of countries that are in imminent danger of being killed, and every day that we don't bus them all into the States, hundreds and maybe thousands of them die. Should we be importing them all onto U.S. soil? I know, I sound heartless, but there are realities that have to be faced as well. The United States cannot possibly save everyone. So how are we supposed to decide who to save? Why does one person get asylum but another doesn't? And that's in cases having to do with adults who can decide for themselves where they want to be. How can the United States government possibly have put themselves in the position of stripping custody from a father who has citizenship in another country simply because the U.S. doesn't agree with how things are going in that country?

I get that the mother thought she was doing what was best for her son, though I'm not sure I agree that taking a six-year-old on an unsafe boat in unsafe waters illegally trying to get to another country was the best bet to go, unless he was physically in danger of being imminently harmed in that country. But I don't see her as the saint that most people have painted her to be. "Oh, the poor woman gave up her own life to give her child a better life, and that was ripped away from him." Yeah, sorry, not quite how I see it.

So, 8 years later, why do we care about one of the 18,000 people who recently joined Cuba's Young Communist Union? Is anyone going to dare say out loud that if only this poor little happy boy had been allowed to stay with his loving relatives in Miami, he would not now be joining a communist organization pledging allegiance to country leaders that so many despise? The United States had the ability to save this little boy, and how, he's lost to the brainwashing of communism.

Maybe I'll be able to calm down enough by tomorrow to write a movie review.