I was thinking about these Venezuelan immigrants who had been flown from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard had walked or been bussed from Venezuela, and how long a bloody trip that is.

First of all, if you try to Google map how long it would take to walk or drive from Caracas, the capital of Venezuela to San Antonio, you cannot do it because, there is no road that will take you the whole way.

The Pan American Highway, which ostensibly runs from rom Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina, should be able to do the trick, but for the Darrien Gap: where the road ends in Colombia and doesn’t begin again in Panama because of an impenetrable rain forest. One can hike through on a difficult and dangerous walk of at least four days through one of the rainiest areas of the planet.

Okay, well what is the flying distance from Caracas to San Antonio? It turns out, that is about 2,418 miles according to a website called TravalMath.

Now if you drove from my home city of Boston to Yellowstone National Park, that would be 2,319 miles, if you took the most direct route that you could. Almost all of it highway (and slighltly less than the distance from Caracas to San Antonio). That trip to Yellowstone would take a Bostonian at least 36 hours of drive-time, and that, of course, excludes the time it takes for rest stops and meals and actually getting some shut eye.

To walk that same distance would take the average person about 701 hours, or more than four weeks if you could walk 24 hours a day. So in reality, at least two to three months. Let’s say three months.

So the point of all this is to prove that you don’t undertake this kind of trip casually.

Presumably, our poor Venezuelan migrants didn’t walk the whole bloody 2400 miles (although they at least had to undertake the 106 mile hike through the Darrien Gap). Presumably they were bussed some of the way by the Coyotes who make a living transporting poor migrants to the border.

You don’t risk your life to travel 2400 miles just for a “better job” or to give your kids a “leg up.”

These people are desparate.

And yet, Governor Ron DeSantis —that compassionate Christian that I’m sure he considers himself to be — thought nothing of using these poor people in a crass p0litical stunt, when they didn’t even arrive in his state.