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His
15 minutes of fame long gone, Elian celebrates
another birthday
Scott Holleran, Guest Columnist.
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, Sunday, December
7, 2003.
Elian Gonzalez, who floated in Florida's
waters four years ago on Thanksgiving, was
10 years old yesterday. The media spectacle
that surrounded his arrival and departure
has given way to obscurity; the world has
forgotten Elian.
Those who ignore Elian's legacy may be
driven by guilt: Most Americans opposed
granting him asylum in America and their
complete repudiation of the Statue of Liberty's
Emma Lazarus poem was accompanied by unrelenting
assurances that he would live like he owned
a sugar plantation (if ownership were allowed
in communist Cuba) or that he would become
a media celebrity (if media were allowed).
Elian, for anyone bothering to account for
the child whose mother died coming to America,
has disappeared, though he occasionally
appears on state-run television in his communist
uniform. The public won and moved on. Elian
lost his freedom -- and America lost its
way.
Each branch of government rejected Elian's
right to live in liberty. The legislative
branch refused to consider making Elian
a citizen, though exceptions had been made
for Vietnam's Boat People, for Cuba's Mariel
boatlift, for Cuba's Operation Peter Pan
and for generations of Mexicans, all of
which included children. Congress granted
no such exclusion to arbitrary immigration
laws for the smallest minority: the individual.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Elian's
plea for asylum, made on his behalf by Elian's
Uncle Lazaro, an auto mechanic who fed,
clothed and housed the child at his two-bedroom
home in Little Havana. Though Elian's defenders
failed to make the case for his asylum on
principle, his Miami family stood against
a judicial system that had fundamentally
betrayed its founding principle: individual
rights.
The nation's most powerful official approved
the initiation of force. On April 22, 2000,
President Clinton, backed by the public
and by each branch of government -- executive,
judicial, legislative -- dispatched gun-toting
agents to seize Elian, marking the first
time America's government forced a child
from a free society and returned him to
a dictatorship. The conviction that it is
better to live in the land of the free than
to live under tyranny had been abandoned.
Educated by modern intellectuals, Americans
had become ignorant of life under communism.
Throughout Elian's saga, people expressed
disbelief that life in Cuba includes no
right to property, association, travel or
speech. Elian, they insisted, belongs with
his father. Whether father and son lived
in freedom or slavery was judged irrelevant:
What mattered to most Americans was that
the two blood relatives were bound together
-- even if it meant they would be gagged
by a dictatorship -- and, anyway, they chortled,
communism in Cuba couldn't be that bad.
Over three years later, not one reporter
has been permitted to observe his condition
unmolested by communist agents. Elian Gonzalez
is fully enslaved and unseen, except when
he is used by Cuba's dictatorship as a pawn
for propaganda.
Yet it is America that has suffered for
its philosophical inversion. As government
agents were snatching Elian, Islamic terrorists,
living illegally in Florida, were busy plotting
the worst attack in U.S. history -- an attack
that would probably have been stopped had
the government enforced its laws. Forcing
a child to return to slavery while our enemies
were miles away planning the most diabolical
act of war offers proof that America has
lost any sense of what matters. A free republic
that refuses to judge its enemies while
spurning a child refugee from tyranny is
doomed by its own contradictions.
As America approaches its third Christmas
at war, we must restore the idea of inalienable
individual rights to a sacred place in our
hearts. There is no better time to do so
than Christmas, which still represents benevolence,
redemption and the notion that children
should bask in the light of joy, not totalitarianism.
We can start by recognizing that a truly
happy birthday -- a celebration of one's
life and future -- is impossible for anyone
living under communism and by acknowledging
that nothing -- not family, not tradition,
not religion -- is more important than an
individual's freedom. It is why the enemy
hates us -- and it is why Elian should be
celebrating his birthday in America.
Scott Holleran (scottholleran@mac.com),
a freelance writer in southern California,
was the first reporter permitted into the
Gonzalez family¹s Miami, Fla., home,
where Holleran met Elian Gonzalez and wrote
about the encounter for several American
newspapers.
©1996-2003 Seattle
Post-Intelligencer
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