A culture war rages anew in the United States between the liberal and the scared.
The latest dramatic battleground pits these combatants:
• The liberal view that America must be compassionately accepting of Syrian refugees because opening our warm and loving arms to the huddled masses is one of our most treasured national ideals.
• The scared view that some of those Syrian refugees might be ISIS plants and that protecting ourselves from harm is the first and singularly most treasured of American objectives.
A liberal proponent? Most prominently we have President Barack Obama, who says it would violate all that America stands for if we closed the door on needy people actually fleeing our mortal and evil enemy, ISIS.
A scared proponent? Pick a Republican. Pretty much any Republican.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson said Monday that he’d resist locating any Syrian refugees in Arkansas because those refugees are the rightful problem of Europe, Asia and Africa.
Former Gov. Mike Huckabee, still nominally running for president, said House Speaker Paul Ryan should stop any Syrian refugees from getting into our country or resign his new job. Ryan could push a bill to remove funding for the refugee program.
Jeb Bush declared that any screening for acceptance of Syrian refugees should first emphasize Christians, which leads to the question of whether it’s an American ideal, or even a Christian one, to save only people professing favored religious views.
That’s not a hard question. It’s neither American nor Christian.
The scared are mounting a powerful movement in the United States. They want to carry guns openly, round up undocumented immigrants and build walls too tall for Mexicans to climb.
In the matter of Syrian refugees they rely on a dubious version of facts to which they apply the frantic overreaction that typically attends fear.
What happened in this instance was that a government official got quoted as saying we get very little reliable information when we first encounter a Syrian refugee.
Then Obama started talking about accepting 10,000 of these refugees in a year.
The scared concluded that we were letting 10,000 possible terrorists into our neighborhoods forthwith.
But that’s not right. The government official was saying that, yes, we have very little reliable information in the beginning. That, he went on to say, is why we impose an intense, several-step vetting process that normally takes 18 months to two years and keeps our actual acceptance of Syrian refugees to a snail’s pace.
The United States government requires of the Syrian refugee:
• Multiple high-level security checks.
• Biometric screening.
• A mandatory interview with the Homeland Security Department.
• A medical screening.
• A cultural orientation program that includes the watching of videos on housing, employment, education and hygiene.
The checkoffs all have expiration dates, which are staggered, and a refugee must have active simultaneous certification in all categories to win acceptance into the United States.
So what we actually have is a wise compromise that embraces the liberal principle of compassion but regulates it with the scared principle of protecting yourself.
There’s nothing wrong with fear so long as it is controlled and not controlling, but applied strategically as an element of a problem’s best resolution.
The ultimate American objective ought to be to do the right thing smartly and safely.
But there remains one fact we must keep in mind: If what we are seeking is an absolute assurance with unassailable certainty that no crazy creep will ever strap a bomb to his person and blow up himself and us in the way that such horror has happened elsewhere in the world, then we must understand and accept that such an unassailable certainty simply does not exist.
We can be ever certain of our own principles. But we can never be certain of everyone else’s.
We can screen 10,000 people tightly over two years. We can allow into the country only small subsets at a time. We can apply at all times ponderous caution and painstaking deliberation.
Yet being wrong only once in 10,000 can cause a lot of harm and heartache.
That wouldn’t mean we were wrong to help the 9,999.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.