Why so quiet?

In the days following the election, many friends raised their voices, insisting that the disillusioned masses give the new president a chance. We’re not bad people, they said. We just have different political ideals, they said. We are just as concerned about other humans as you lefties, they said.

Yet their silence over the last 48 hours has said more than their words ever did.

If you voted for Trump, and claimed that you were mislabeled as xenophobic for so doing, where is your voice decrying this most recent un-Constitutional, un-American, un-Godly executive order? I was willing to try out the idea that maybe you voted for this atrocity of an administration out of some combination of deeply-held convictions and misguided hope and, at the end of the day, you were still a good person who would stand up to evil.

Yet, the silent majority is even more shocking to me than the vocal few who are defending this barbarity.

Those vocal few seem to be hanging their hats on the need for security. But, if security is your primary concern, why target refugees? Refugees are the most vetted group of people who enter this country, and they have little to no say in what country they’ll even be sent to. Before they ever step on American soil, they are screened by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, a resettlement support center contracted by the Department of State, the actual Department of State, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, additional US law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the National Counterterrorism Center, the Refugee Affairs Division, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and a medical doctor. When they arrive at our border, they are screened again by Customs and Border Protection.

The whole process takes 18 to 24 months. And it works. You are 369 times more likely to be killed by falling out of bed than by an Islamic jihadist immigrant. Notice that says immigrant, not refugee. There’s no breakdown data available for being killed by a refugee because they don’t pose a threat.

The reason the refugee program exists is because our country recognized the enormity of the mistake of barring Jewish refugees during World War II. We saw what we had done and vowed that we would never stand by while innocents were slaughtered. Yet here we are.

Will you stand up and call this what it is, or will you cower behind your vote and insist that we give evil another chance?