U2 Can Spend American Money

 
The singer famous for edgy protest songs in the 1980s and catchy commercial songs after the group matured wants to be known for his activism as much as for being the front man for one of the most popular rock groups in the world.
 
In an April 12th New York Times op-ed, Bono called for a “Marshall Plan,” paid for by Western nations, to pay for the mass of people who have left their home countries. The official media description is that the masses are “migrants” fleeing their war-torn homelands. Others point out that many of the people are not from war-torn countries and are not migrants at all. The terrorist group ISIS stated that they would flood Europe with warriors, and now that flood is arriving. Two views of the same event do not converge; therefore, one solution will never satisfy such disparate perspectives. Bono appears oblivious about such divergent views.
 
“Invaders” is not a word that would enter the rocker’s vocabulary. If one percent of one million migrants are invading at the behest of ISIS, that means there are 10,000 invaders. Increase the figure to two million. Try four million:  forty thousand invaders have streamed into Europe. What if the correct percent of invaders is really five percent? When one sees video footage of people stepping off trains in Germany and nearly every person is a young male, is five percent too high of an estimate? When news agencies filmed from the safety of helicopters, showing long streams of young males making the long trek to Germany, was ten percent a reasonable assumption?
 
We do not know the correct percentage of invaders per migrants, and government officials in Europe and the U.S. do not seem to want to learn the true number.
 
The most interesting aspect of Bono’s op-ed is what is missing:  nowhere does he mention that Saudi Arabia should take in people who share a common belief system and culture. In fact, he fails to mention Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, or Oman. Middle East countries with healthy standards of living can keep their money and remain closed to the hordes of Muslims without drawing the ire of liberals throughout the West. Bono is only interested in Western nations paying for his dream world, with no explanation given why Muslim countries should be given a pass.
 
To take Bono seriously is to understand that we Americans are being given financial, monetary, and diplomatic advice by a rock singer who is not American. Certainly the Irish singer means well, just as most modern liberals do; the problem is that modern liberals are statists. The State can cure anything and everything- at least the liberal State in the Western world.
 
If a conservative personality declared publicly that only the Western world could solve the problems of Africa and the Middle East, he would be called “racist,” a “narrow-minded bigot,” and a host of other epithets. If the individual endorsed products, well, no he would not. Such endorsements would be brought to an immediate halt due to media outcry.
 
Bono is wise enough to be vague. He simply points out that it would be “thinking bigger” to have a new “Marshall Plan.” Nevertheless, the rocker-turned diplomat knows how the United States should spend its money:
 
1. The U.S. should spend more money on humanitarian aid, although he fails to mention that the U.S. Agency for International Development will spend over $22 billion on foreign aid in Fiscal Year 2017.
 
2. The U.S. should develop programs (spend money) to ensure that migrants “get education, training and access to the labor market.” He even made sure that he used the American liberal word “invest” as a euphemism for “spend.” No mention was made of the $19 trillion American debt.
 
3. The U.S. should spend more money on countries losing their populations to Europe. He reasons that the world does not want Nigeria to turn into Syria. Syria is falling apart; they need American money. If Nigeria falls apart, they will need American money. You get the idea.
 
The Marshall Plan was hatched because Europe was in tatters. Tens of millions of lives were in jeopardy, and the excesses of statism- Nazi fascism and Italian fascism- were stopped at great costs to life and property. Lives had to be saved. Economies had to be rebuilt. Civilization had to be restored.
 
The current “migration” to Europe is not coming from the “shopkeepers, teachers, and musicians” envisioned by the rock singer, rather by people who are making demands:  demands that they can inflict their culture on Europe. Recent history has taught us that, contrary to Bono’s assertions, many Muslim migrants do not want to work, but instead will live off the government dole. This may not be true of all who have crossed into Europe, but the misadventures of Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK, and France have shown us the perils of an influx of immigrants from Muslim nations.
 
The U2 song “Sunday Bloody Sunday” memorialized an event wherein 14 unarmed people were killed. The irony does not seem to occur to Bono that this invasion of Europe will prove to be far more deadly than a group of British soldiers shooting unarmed Irish dissenters. Bono is simply another economically illiterate, guilt-ridden liberal who seems to believe that the West was built upon the backs of the rest of the world, and now it is time for us to pay, literally.
 
Bono was more entertaining when he still hadn’t found what he was looking for. Before he matured, the Irish crooner was less expensive to the West.