A Modest Proposal
For Preventing the Children of Displaced People in Syria from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public
By Nathan Jaco
Jonathan Swift-boating the children of Syria:
Tis a sad state of affairs when one attempts to walk the shores of southern Europe and the eastern seaboard of these United States. One can enjoy scant freedom of pedal movement without being forced to step over the body of yet another desiccated corpse of a pitiable refugee child. Bodies washing up to the shore is such an unpleasant site, and they, vestiges of personages such as Aylan Kurdi, even have the unmitigated gall to do so without giving the sensitive viewer a trigger warning that they may be about to see something dreadful. This is the height of inconsiderate. So out of hand is the situation that one’s passions cannot help but be enflamed; mostly on the basis of losing the full and proper enjoyment of the warm sands of the native shores. What’s worse, one will undoubtedly occasion upon some troubled and desperate refugee of the female sex, followed by no less than three, four, or even a dozen children in tow—two-by-two as they go.
The present deplorable state of their nation is worth remarking. More than 200,000 mortals have given up the ghost in the conflicts there. Once earlier in the present decade, in the Year of Our Lord Twenty and Eleven, the Arab Spring gave birth to a resistance movement which beget a counter-resistance movement by the Assad government which beget entrée into the conflict by a terrorist organization known only as “ISIL” (or “ISIS” or “Daesh” or “the Islamic State” or tersely “IS” when one is pressed for time or in danger of running out of ink).
Our commonwealth has accepted around 1 in 100 of the numbers of souls that have been lost in the conflict. As a basis for comparison, the fatherland of the Teutons has accepted almost 40,000 asylum seekers of Assyrian decent and others from elsewhere in Mesopotamia, and our neighbor to the frozen lands of the Great North has accepted 36,000. During the first three years of the conflict, these United States admitted just one and a half score per annum, but that number was trebled last year. Thus, simple cogitation can give an accounting sufficient to render the obvious fact that the majority we have admitted arrived upon our shores in the present year.
Resettlement has become a paramount question on the minds of many high officials of the land. Since a refugee resettlement program began in earnest since the days of the glorious and victorious war in Indochina, no fewer than three million refugees. As a matter of course we can infer that this program has done naught but save lives in a way that reflects our values and traditions.
It is the law of the land that one a refugee has been admitted to one of the nine score resettlement locations, or other place, they must apply to have the status of a Legal Permanent Resident within one year. To enjoy the full rights, light, and benefits of their status as refugees, many must remain in the state in which they originally settled. Administering these affairs is a monumental task, and monumentally expensive. The Refugee Admissions Program has an allocated withdrawal from the public coffers in an amount of one billion per fiscal year, with resettlement agencies receiving a generous stipend of nearly $2,000 per refugee from the ministry of State. Were we to increase the number of refugees admitted to at least 10,000 heads that would be $20 million for Syrian refugees alone. This would bring the total of settled in our commonwealth to less than three in a hundred thousand of the four million and three hundred thousand of the refugees fleeing Syrian who are properly registered with the United National High Commissioner for Refugees. We would be expensing our public exchequer to put not even a dent in the problem. No less a mind than the eminent citizen, one Mr. Sean Hannity, suggests that the governors of the commonwealth are planning upon accepting two hundred and fifty thousand refugees. This would increase the $20 million cost 250-fold.
Once resettled, a refugee must face the standard economical fate of citizens of the realm. It is estimated that half of the refugees are children. It is separately estimated that the cost of rearing a child from dam to den to emancipation is a sum of $304,480. The first year of its life, the Syrian refugee will suckle at its mother’s breast and be supported by her milk, and may cost at most not above the value of $4,000. This means that upon the end of the first year of life the child will begin to cost a sum of $48 39c each day. Given those dastardly do-gooders and their child labor laws, youths may only enroll to work in non-farm employment upon their fourteenth birthday and may do so not more than 23 hours per week. Fortunately, there are no such prohibitions for youths aged sixteen and seventeen. At a Federal minimum wage of $7 25c per hour, and tis hard to imagine them being much more valuable than that, and were their owners to work them every week, which would surely teach them the value of hard work, for the maximum allowable hours (assuming year-round schooling it would take to teach them to think properly) they could scarcely earn a pence more than $47,502. That leaves $256,978 in their bringing up unremunerated by their own labors, which must be provided by parents or state. In the case of parentage, that means that a proud American citizen must be displaced from a job. In the case of state, that implies that a proud American worker must sacrifice some of his hard-earned coin for the cause of bringing, or perhaps more to the point raising, a child of foreign birth. Is there no better use for these cost units?
To this end I hope to propose, modestly, which will not be liable to the least objection. I propose that we recruit these children in the cause of defending their own homeland. A child of age twelve and sound of mind and members will have twelve of eighteen parts the strength of a military age man, and thus be two thirds his strength. It will therefore take only one and one third of children of this age for each man on the opposing side of the battlefield. By mathematical law, the average age of a child is 10. Being ten eighteenths the strength of a man, it will take slightly less than two children to overcome each man in battle. I have it on good authority that the number of fighters in ISIL is 31,500. We can easily figure that sixty and three thousand children should be sufficient and able to overcome ISIL. There being not less than 200,000 militants in Syria, we need only one in five of the total children who’ve fled Syria to return there as combatants. Furthermore, the combatants may be so shocked to see an army of child soldiers that the youthful warriors gain a tactical advantage. In this way, one can clearly see the value of child soldiers as tactical innovation (yes, that’s a real line: www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/....
Let us visit other advantages of this proposal, peculiarly those of an economical nature. Were they to be turned away immediately upon arrival, with no more provisions than those suited for war, they would save us most of the costs outlined above. Since most aren’t expected to survive more than a few days, most would not need provisions in excess of those they would be expected to consume the first week of combat. These minimum provisions include one Kalashnikov service rifle per child, which is $1,500 but can be bought in bulk at a price of $600, one junior combat uniform at some fraction of the full cost of $102 4c, and seven ounces of chick pea hummus at 12c per ounce. This is 702.88 per child, or $7,028,800 per 10,000, or $44,281,440 for the cost of equipping an army of child soldiers capable of besting ISIL. This is a fraction of the cost per child. It is cheaper to send children off to battle than rear and educate them, as many nations past and present have realized.
But we may only want to send the males of the breed and reserve the females for further production, provided we could find louts and cads who could stomach the process of breeding with them. One hears that the female of the Syrian race may produce a litter as early as eight years of age , when they may be customarily married off to a man—often many times their age—and we can only assume these marriage would take place if they were reproduction-worthy, it is not like people in other parts of the world would marry children for the sheer pleasure of it. That is less than half the age when good Christian girls of Saxon descent may become betrothed to a gentleman. When girls of the latter sort are chaste and pure as the first ivory snowfall of winter, Syrian girls are capable of bearing seed, and by the law of numbers will give birth to additional units of production a one in every two. This would increase their production exponentially, at length, until such point as additional unit were no longer necessary, in which case the production could be stopped by intervention. It is rumored that the gestation period of the Syrian refugee is as low as ninety and six rotations of God’s green Earth about its axis. Why brilliant minds such as those of Josiah Wedgwood, Richard Arkwright, and Matthew Boulton could scare have devised a more efficient system for production.
Is it just to send children off to war? It is more than just, as is cognizable after only a bit of consideration. The number of sensate nerve endings in the adult human body is around twenty million. Using anthropomorphic reference charts made by somatic cartographers, if one takes the average weights of the male and the female that gives 180.85 imperial standard pounds for the adult, with a child of 12 years in the middle percentile being 39.9 kilograms or just around 87.96 lbs. Thus, your standard youth of twelve is but one half of the size of a fully-grown adult, and somewhat less than that in the quantity of nearly parts two in one hundred, and must, by the science of good reason, have only half the number of number of nerves as the adult; this number being less in the case of even younger children. Thus, the sensations children feel are relatively muted, and therefore being less sensate they are fitter for the rigors of combat as they are less apt to suffer so severely upon being injured or in the moments before death, with the ever younger being fitter than any older than the same. It is simply abhorrent to force a man to do a child’s work. Furthermore, in their nonage children simply no know better morals and sense of justice, nor do they bear the burden of their own sins and only that of Original Sin. Therefore, were they to meet their Maker after being expired upon the field of battle, as that almost certainly would, they would be absolved of the crimes and sins of war.
Hopefully this bit of wickedly dark satire makes it obvious how monstrous it is to turn away the children displaced by the Syrian civil war and the mothers that care for them. We must accept child refugees. Failure to do so means subjecting them to certain death, as if we were sending them off to war against the enemies from whom they are fleeing. While I don’t support allowing in military age males, especially single Muslim men, if there exists such a thing as an absolute moral imperative, then we have an absolute moral imperative to care for the children displaced by a war whose fires we have in no small part stoked…