What Eritrean migrants could teach Ted Cruz
By Richard Cohen, Published: October 14
This is how it happened.
The migrants came from Eritrea, which is on the Horn of Africa and where the per capita income is about $800 a year. They sold everything they had, even their land, and then were trucked across the Sahara Desert with very little to eat or drink and taken to the Libyan port of Misurata. There, about 500 people were crammed onto a boat, which sailed for 13 days until the engines quit and the ship went dead in the water off the Italian island of Lampedusa. It was night, so the captain signaled the shore by setting fire to a blanket, which somehow ignited a drum of benzene. The fire spread and the panicked Eritreans fled to one side of the boat, capsizing it. Most of them couldn’t swim. Most of them drowned.
In the water, the living clung to the floating dead — 339 of them. Whole families perished. The Italian navy came by. Some migrants were rescued and brought to Lampedusa, which is closer to Tunisia than it is to Sicily. The mayor, Giusi Nicolini, wept at the scene. She had been through this before — previous drownings of African migrants — and she will undoubtedly go through it again. Last Friday, yet another ship capsized, this one off Malta, and 27 people drowned. The desperate, it seems, are very desperate indeed.
On the idyllic Mediterranean islands, the dead come in with the tide. Lampedusa promotes itself as “paradise.” I have seen these islands and I will not quibble. What’s more, the name of the island is that of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of “The Leopard,” a great, opulent book embracing life in all its glorious idiocy. To connect the chiaroscuro wonders of the novel with the darkness of the drownings is both ridiculous and inescapable. Here again is life in all its idiocy.
Still, there is yet another connection. The drownings occurred during Ted Cruz time. This is the period in our history when the senator from Texas and others think that what they want to do is so important they can shut down the U.S. government. They are suffused with an immense sense of self-importance. They declare their moment a crisis, and in a crisis you are obliged to do things you might otherwise not do — such as threaten to pitch the country into default. It is that important.
full article
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-what-eritrean-migrants-could-teach-ted-cruz/2013/10/14/3bfde3d6-34f7-11e3-be86-6aeaa439845b_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines
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