A long time ago, maybe about 30 years, I saw this video about what to do in case of a kidnapping, God forbid. The video said “never go to crime scene #2.” In other words if they tell you to get in the car and drive you somewhere else, never go if you can avoid it, because what happens there is going to be — (fill in the blank, it doesn’t need to be said). They said that if someone throws you in the trunk, you should kick the taillights out, and they showed how to do that.
I watched this video and didn’t really understand it on a deep level. It didn’t make sense to me. I did not realize how many people are kidnapped and/or trafficked every day. I did not realize that what they were showing was just a teeny tiny microdose of a response to a complete cancerous epidemic.
Yesterday I wanted to watch a movie so I picked “Man on Fire” (2004) from Amazon, chiefly because I had heard of the movie and I always like Denzel Washington shows. Believe me when I tell you that I do not want every single show I watch to be about kidnapping and/or human trafficking. And yet there it was, little Dakota Fanning giving crime statistics for Mexico, kidnappings, some unbelievable rate and the people are taken for a massive ransom. It was normal in this movie for people to have a bodyguard just so they could live their ordinary lives.
I thought about border security (or the lack thereof), the massive inflow of undocumented migrants today, and how different it looked from the inside, when I was a public affairs specialist there (DHS/CBP) from 2005-2012. I know these people. They went to sleep and woke up petrified of being “the weak link in the chain” (EXACT WORDS) in case of another potential 9/11. Things did start to go bad when Obama took office and Janet Napolitano became the head of DHS. Everything was a secret meeting. They came up with this concept of “Our Border” and made it into a “social network.” It isn’t “Our Border,” there is a U.S. border and a Mexican border, and though they may share the same geographical location we are two different countries.
When then-candidate Trump said “they’re not sending their best” about Mexico in 2016, he was not talking about ordinary struggling people but rather about the country of Mexico enabling criminals to come here. I’m pretty sure we don’t want to be like the parents of Dakota Fanning in the movie, hiring a bodyguard and knowing that it probably won’t matter because the country is just not safe for living, so you would need an impenetrable steel fortress to actually be safe from these thugs.
The point is, most public policy is common sense. This is something we desperately need to bring back. Regardless of what has happened in the past — AND THE PAST IS A DOOZY — if normal people sit down to work things out, a solution can usually be arrived at which makes sense to any rational person.
This general approach includes everything, and it is not necessary to give example after example.
By Dr. Dannielle Blumenthal (Dossy). All opinions are the author’s own. Public domain.
Writing by Dr. Dannielle Blumenthal 