Hypocrisy in a Brave New World

Yesterday I was talking to a woman at work about the stuff in the news.  She was lamenting the number of innocent children being hurt and killed in the Middle East.  She wanted to stop the senseless killing, the accidental shooting of children, the maiming, the destruction of lives before they were fully begun.  She wanted to donate money to help care for these children.  She wanted to send troops to protect them and stop the madness.    And with hardly a breath between sentences, she went on to complain about the 52000 illegal immigrants being "welcomed into our country, using up our resources, costing the taxpayers money for their food, legal representation, healthcare and foster care.  She understood the armed protesters going to stop them at the border.  She thought they would turn into crimnals in our country.  She thought it was time we got tough.
When I started talking about the history of the countries those children were coming from, the civil wars, the gangs that started in our own cities that were then transferred back to those countries when we deported the immigrants from the 1980's that created gangs to compete with the gangs already here and then ended up in prison.  If you want to fine-hone a gangster--send them to prison--they are truly bad when they get out and we should all work-out so much.
We deported them, and they took that new culture back home, where the whole drug cartel/gangster's- running-everything-and-everyone-that-can't-afford-their-own-persona-army-is-at-their-mercy lifestyle took off like a rabbit that saw a fox.  The people back home, countries that had been simple/agragrian/translate--poor---were helpless,  And the children either joined the gangs or became their pawns, to be used and sold and extorted.
Would I send my children on a thousand mile trip alone?  Are they being sent alone, or are coyotes promising to take them here for a price.  How desparate does a poor person have to be to save enough money from the food money that isn't enough already to send their children away in the hands of people as questionable as--well let's face it--the reputation of the coyote is of a tricky/sly/good-fer-nothing predator.  (personally, I  like the animals, but know better than to leave my pets out at night)  How bad does it have to be to think that is a risk worth taking.  Do Central American poor people not value their children at all?  Or are they seeing something happening right their in front of their eyes that is so much worse than anything they could imagine that they start hiding money and hunting for someone to save their kids?
But what about us?  Why are we hating these kids so much?  We have been deeply invested in middle-eastern politics for a long time.  We hear about their economies, their politics, their terrorists and we want to fight their wars, send our own young people to die for them.  They are obviously valuable.  But is it their human life we value, or their resources.
Our own southern bordering countries have been having issues for generations and what have we done--"build a taller fence, send more guards, deport them."  Reality is, there are as many people with relatives on both sides of that border as there were on relatives separated by the Berlin Wall.  The history of North and South America are not so different, the people here when the Europeans, Africans, and Asians started coming over were very closely related.  And the original immigrants were closely related.  The time frames were similar as far as the original immigration.  The methods were different and the language was different.
But i don't know anyone that speaks any of the middle eastern languages that didn't come to this country with their parents.  I have always known people that also speak Spanish.  Its the most likely language to be taught in public school, the second being French, and we have neighbors that speak that also.
Maybe that is the problem.  We used to all know and help our neighbors.  Mr Rogers encouraged it long after the necessity of it ended(amazing what automobiles and telephones cured)  Now, the neighbors are the people we fight with over ugly fences, loud radios, and pets---our charity, both financial and volunteering are spent with larger groups that help people that we never see.  It's like the person that goes on a mission to a distant country to bring them food but calls the mayor every week about "those nasty homeless people"
When I was a teenager, the big rebellion was at the hypocrits our parents were when we first started looking at them as people instead of our heroes.  A parent that didn't get called a hypocrit by their child had definitely failed to raise an intelligent and independent child.  They earned the name when they drank a beer and wouldn't let us, when they went to church after being at the bar the night before, when they bought themselves suits and wouldn't pony-up the money for a new pair of jeans.  Obviously, we were not living in a place of danger, our parents felt no need to spend their last dime sending us to another country.  There were dangers to people in poor places, people struggling right in this country to be treated like first class citizens, but that was not the issue to my pals and I.  We were all about being treated like adults.
Now, half a century later, it is my generation that is the hypocrits.  And it isn't about the petty stuff we complained about.  It is big stuff, big-as-the-nose-on-your-face stuff.  The kind of hypocrisy that makes people look silly and blind and ridiculous.  The kind that makes us look petty.
I guess we haven't changed that much after all.