Refugee Programming

A big question we’ll be asking is “did you show them cartoons?”. I’m talking about the refugee kids, new to the Americas in many cases, or maybe just new to the northerners and their ways. They’ve probably heard of Loony Tunes and thought maybe that’s what they’d be getting.

That’d be kinda like being an Iraqi kid and thinking Uncle Bush was gonna bring Sea World from Florida. Don’t tell me “no theme parks were planned” as I just wouldn’t believe that about my country. We’re like Disney bots. 

Maybe that’s why I think of Mickey Mouse when I think of the “evacuate Gaza” project. We’re talking about the volunteers. Some choose to stay and fight, much like in the case of the Ukrainians, the Syrians, and so on. I’m imagining a flotilla of cruise ships showing toons and documentaries, opening doors in a global university that was never confined to west Asia. Go back when they’ve rebuilt your campus. They teach us.

Seriously, refugees (students and professoriate) are not going to disappear, as peoples falling through the cracks of the nation state system (only so many jigsaw puzzle pieces work as one). I’ve been suggesting the religions and the universities provide a next layer (safety net), and they have been doing that to some degree, and not because motivated by my suggestions. My suggestions are more for me, a nobody, notes to self, about how I need to keep perhaps anonymously busy. I have some experiences to draw upon. I’m another player.

When I call us “Disney bots” I’m not being supercritical or mean, and yes I know about the crisis in believability, the incredulity, which has surrounded Epcot in many dimensions. The corporate sector was apparently never serious about the future, witness hyper-loop, witness colonies on Mars, condemning us to retro lifestyles centered around dead end science fiction. We feel our own useless obsolescence, and that’s not pleasant necessarily — a kind of metaphysical arthritis, a stiffening. They’ll say we were time wasters, i.e. out of sync with Mother Nature.

Yes, I’m talking about dealing with the mass migrations of human beings that have not abated, by land, sea and nowadays air. The idea that we’re all settling down and staying put might be a comforting myth in some craniums, but we can’t organize human affairs around security blanket fantasies. People seek to counter tyranny, pestilence and wars, and we know from the anthropology manuals that “fight or flight” remain the conventional options. Flight is still one of them. Fleeing is another way to countervail.

The Friends, known as Quakers in the vernacular, have always recommended finding ways to root out the root causes of outward wars, focusing more at the psyops level, seeking to resolve and dissolve more than further polarize and mindlessly escalate. 

Sometimes it helps to have the kids draw, or make cartoons, as a kind of working-through, as a therapy. One might blog for the same reason: to process (cite Process Work). We also show them cartoons made by others, their peers. We let them know this world still bullies and abuses humans, and that we’re working on it, and that we could use their help. 

Am I talking about some kind of government brainwashing then? I’m talking about leaving favorable impressions from first encounters. Americans greeting Americans. We get off on the right foot. This isn’t about “fighting Indians” or anything so misguidedly juvenile.