Charita Goshay: Sooner or later, world's troubles end up at America's doorstep

When the Nazis rolled into Poland in 1939, it kicked off a worldwide conflict − but many Americans wanted no part of it.

The harrowing memories of World War I still resonated for people who fought it and who didn't want their sons to experience the same fate.

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The onset of a second world war spurred the birth of the isolationist America First Committee, whose best-known acolyte was Col. Charles Lindbergh, the aviation hero who made no secret of his admiration for Nazi Germany.

Lindbergh also became a disciple of the quack science of eugenics, and an anti-Semite, and used to his celebrity to convince Americans that Germany could not be defeated, so why bother?

Pearl Harbor, of course, changed everything.

Calls for American isolationism vanished with the first wave of kamikaze.

In the decades hence, we have learned that no matter how much we may want to isolate, sooner or later, the world lands on our doorstep.

Last month, Lake Township resident Eric Tabaro Nshimiye was arrested and charged with committing horrendous war crimes in Rwanda in 1994. During that civil war between tribes, more than 800,000 Rwandans were murdered over a 100-day killing spree that included rape, butchery and genocide.

Federal authorities accuse Nshimiye of taking part in the genocide and lying about it in order to gain entry into the US.

He vehemently denies the charges.

People who know and love Nshimiye say he's simply not capable of such atrocity. In an interview with the Canton Repository on April 14, Nshimiye's wife, Chantal, describes her husband as a devout man who has never exhibited the kind of violent pathology required to rape, torture and murder people indiscriminately.

His fellow parishioners at St. Paul Catholic Church in North Canton, and his neighbors in Lake Township, say you couldn't ask for a better man. An engineer with the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., he embodies the American Dream.

For the rest of us, it is a stunning crash-course in geopolitics.

When we are ignorant about other countries or cultures, when we can't be bothered to keep up with world events because we don't think they'll affect us, it perpetuates a naivete that catches us by surprise, often to our detriment.

It would not be inaccurate to say that Rwanda is a place most Americans, know nothing about.

Stories from the continent are not often found in American media because, well, it's Africa.

But because we are the leader of the world, the world always finds us.

It found us on Sept, 11, 2001, resulting in the deaths of 3,000 innocent people, and two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Nazism we thought was vanquished by our grandfathers in 1945 has roared back to life in such places as Charlottesville, the Tree of Life Synagogue, and even in the hearts of people who live among us.

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The world found us again in the form of a deadly virus, whose full impact has yet to be measured.

Just as the debate over Vietnam showed up uninvited at our dinner tables in the 1960s, the world has barged onto our college campuses and highways in the form of protests over the Palestinian crisis in Gaza, along with renewed accusations of antisemitism.

The world is standing at our southern border, which is teeming with people desperate to flee the violence, poverty and corruption that have destroyed their countries.

The Biden Administration has floundered for a solution, but our broken immigration system is a tin can we've been kicking around for 50 years. We also know there are people who don't want a solution, as evidenced by Congress' refusal to consider a bipartisan immigration bill last month.

It all can be overwhelming because, as much as we like to think otherwise, there is no hiding place.

For better or worse (primarily for the better) we are the big dog, the place that draws freedom-loving people from across the globe. We must strive to understand and become more aware of what is happening in other places and why, because the distance from world events to our own lives is growing shorter by the moment.

Charita M. Goshay is a Canton Repository staff writer and member of the editorial board. Reach her at 330-580-8313 or charita.goshay@cantonrep.com. On Twitter: @cgoshayREP.

This article originally appeared on The Repository: World is too connected for America to operate in isolation