A “Red herring” is a kind of rhetorical trick, a distracting, irrelevant issue introduced in an argument to divert the attention of listeners or readers away from the real problems that confront us.
An example of a “Red herring”, is immigration across our southern border presenting the most pressing issue facing the United States, and a simpleton’s solution to this “crisis “is building a wall across our southern border. Immigration has never been a national crisis for our country, it’s how we were founded. We all took our turn as immigrants in coming to America, we were all called names, endured insults and accusations and we all paid the price of shouldering the prejudice that always attended new immigrant groups upon arrival.
The only non-immigrants living in this country have always been the Native Americans who have called this continent their home for over fifteen thousand years, and whom we’ve all but decimated until now, many of them live in abject poverty on reservations, in shacks without running water or hope. These Native Americans are our legacy and our national shame.
We don’t need an incredibly expensive wall on our southern borders to serve as a monument to our stupidity and short-sightedness, even as we move well into the twenty-first century. The joke has clearly been on us, for all the world to enjoy. Ask the Europeans who’ve been watching us over the last few years what their perceptions are of our priorities has been. Ask the Chinese how well their Great Wall served them over the several thousand years of its history.
One of our problems seems to be that we don’t learn very well from history. Witness Iraq and Afghanistan. The Russians spent ten futile years attempting to colonize these lands to further their strategic hold in this part of the world and failed miserably. Yet, no sooner had the Russians departed when the United States tried essentially the same strategy with a different name, and ended up spending twenty years there… twice as long as the Russians spent, and yet, failed just as miserably. How many lives lost and investment of time and resources simply wasted on something that in the end, yielded nothing for any nation, least of all Iraq and Afghanistan?
Where should we be concentrating our resources? Eliminating our nearly two-year Covid crisis by pulling together as a nation and working toward compromise in congress to fight our way back to freedom once again. And rather than worrying about the “Red Herring” foolishness of a failed, past administration, we need to find our way back home to how our fathers pulled together during the last great world war to save this nation for all of us.
We need to focus on the future… we need a cure for the many forms of Cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and the myriad other debilitating diseases that well-funded research can resolve for humanity, we need housing for our homeless and food for their tables, we need broad band for everyone as a minimum life-line available to all, we need bridges, roads and rails that are safe and up to date, we need airports that can safely handle the increased traffic in our skies, we need renewable, alternative energy sources that won’t cost our children’s futures, and cyber security that will provide for our uninterrupted commerce and communication. And we need free access to higher education for those who desire this and apprenticeships for others who wish to pursue hands-on professions.
We need to spend our finite resources on things that will help improve the lives of everyone on the planet, for the lesson is clear after what we’ve experienced in the last eighteen months:
As with the COVID Pandemic, if we all aren’t pulling together…aren’t single-minded on survival being our first priority, the pandemic will eventually out-maneuver us over time, and we will sadly bury our family members, one by one.