Marco, the ungrateful coward

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” – Inscription on the Statue of Liberty

Thousands of migrants show up on our shores every year. They come for a variety of reasons. Some are here in search of the better life a job might provide. Others are running from situations that drive a mother to take a child on a treacherous journey — over thousands of miles — seeking safety and shelter. There are reasons and stories to last us a lifetime. They are the American story.

Such was the case of a mother and father who, with a young son, came to the United States decades ago. It is not exactly clear if they were here in search of work, or possibly running from a brutal dictator. Also not clear was how they entered the country — legally or illegally. Whatever the case, they managed to stay and make a living here. They both worked hard. He became a bartender and she cleaned rooms in hotels. He also held a part time job as a school crossing guard, she stocked shelves at Kmart. 

As the years went by and they prospered, they had another son born in the United States. They named him Marco. He would go on to become the first son of Cubans to become speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. Later a U.S. senator and presidential candidate in 2016.  

No matter the circumstances, it’s a compelling story. 

The sad part of this tale is that the person who most benefited from this American story, now a senior senator from Florida, is an ungrateful coward who refuses to grant others, some in much worse situations than his parents ever experienced, the same privilege his family once was afforded. 

Marco Rubio now fully supports a president he referred to as a “con man.” A man who recently told four members of Congress, all women of color, to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Marco and The Don both know that the women come from Minnesota, New York, Michigan and Massachusetts. So there’s no doubt what the president meant by his racist tweet. Then last week when a crowd chanted “Send them back, Send them back,” the president stood there and said nothing.

Yet, Little Marco, the name once given to him by this same bigoted president, refused to call the president what he is, a racist. Instead, Rubio called the president’s tweet wrong and the crowd-chanting “grotesque,” and then blamed “left wing politicians & many in the media.” The left wing politicians he was referring to, of course, the same four women Trump had insulted.

Then there’s the case of Trump’s concentration camps, one of the biggest right here in Miami’s Homestead area. We have seen the pictures. Conditions inhumane. Children, some younger than five, held prisoners in cages. Laura Bush compared the actions to Japanese internment camps during World War II. 

And what has Marco done? He defended the Trump policy, and instead called out President Obama for the scenes playing out along the border right now.

But worse yet, the hypocrite in Marco passes himself off as a staunch Catholic, who, as reported by Miami New Times, at the same time he was defending the president’s vile actions with immigrant children, tweeted Psalms 5: 5-7: “You hate all who do evil.”

In a recent Progreso Weekly column Max Castro called Trump the Stephen King of presidents. Max wrote that the president “traffics in terror, horror and suspense.”

So we can therefore deduct that Marco Rubio, the son of immigrants, is helping enable the devil. He is both ungrateful and a coward. Because if he had cojones, as a former Secretary of State once called them, he would face off with the president and try to stop this inhumanity and disgrace. He would also admit that if Trump had been president back in 1956, his parents most probably would have been sent back to what the mafioso-style Don considers just another “shithole” Latin American country. And, by the way, his older brother Mario, then only 6, might have ended up one of those poor children in cages we now house in Marco’s home town of Miami. 

Horror as fiction and fact