What if Mary and Joseph Came to Today’s Washington?
On the second day of Christmas, my true love said to me, “You ought to write about the family that took in the South Korean tourists who were stranded near Buffalo.”
Indeed, Alexander Campagna and his wife, Andrea, deserve to have good things placed in their stockings.
As deadly blizzard conditions piled up on Friday, trapping cars and emergency vehicles across the Buffalo area in New York state, the couple tried to help a group of tourists from South Korea dig their passenger van out of a ditch.
As the weather got worse and their snow shoveling couldn’t catch up, the Campagnas gave up and immediately invited the travelers in to share a big Christmas Eve dinner of Korean home-cooking and watch the Bears lose — I feel your pain, Chicago — to the Buffalo Bills.
Their heartwarming story gave newspeople and the nation just what we needed: some actual good news to soften the misery of a major disaster.
I needed to hear that story because I was enraged by another disaster, the busloads of migrants that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott dropped off near Vice President Kamala Harris’ official residence in Washington on the night before Christmas.
The group of about 130 men, women and children arrived short of coats or shoes as many clutched only blankets in the freezing 18-degree cold.
It was the latest stunt by Republican governors to protest President Joe Biden’s border policies. Migrants have been sent to such Democratic-run cities as Washington, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia — without advance notice.
Fortunately, mutual aid organizations in Texas notified volunteers in the District of Columbia, who scrambled to meet the asylum-seekers. A church on Capitol Hill agreed to shelter the group while the mutual aid organization SAMU First Response arranged 150 breakfasts, lunches and dinners by the restaurant chain Sardis, according to The Washington Post.
For his callous lack of notice, the Texas governor deserves a lump of coal. Or as Bianca Vasquez, an organizer for Washington’s Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, put it, “The goal is really to dump people in a place where it will make a big political impact. The cruelty is the point.”
...continued
(c) 2022 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
