Response to Not Wanted

(See: Just Above Sunset: Not Wanted)

I hear what Charles Blow is saying here, but have to kind of disagree.

He implies that if you’re not a minority, you have a choice that minority folks don’t have about whether to either look the other way, or even to get into line to follow Donald Trump. But that would assume everyone values only their own skin and the skin of their own kind.

My deep-seated beef with Trump and his followers is that he and they are trying to destroy my country, to which I have no choice but to fight him, and to make sure that either it doesn’t happen or I go down fighting.

If it feels inevitable, and doesn’t at all seem like a choice I get to make, then in effect, it isn’t one.

In fact, I can’t help but suspect that most of those complaining about an "Hispanic Invasion”, including the El Paso shooter and those like him, come from families who arrived here in the 1800s or later, which would make them the real invaders, not the Latinos.

And even from the perspective of myself, someone whose family arrived here in the early 1600s, a decade or so after the Mayflower, I myself might regard not only the shooter but the whole Trump family and administration, from the president on down — and certainly all the cretins who show up at his rallies to cheer and sneer — as recent invaders of my country who, rather than understanding and appreciating the American values that greeted them on their arrival, are threatening to abrogate them, without serious consideration of the history of their new-found home, and they all wear stupid red hats to prove it.

In  short, maybe all these late-coming whiners should just pack up their silly hats and go back to their own miserable countries!

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But other than that, Blow is outraged by the same things that I am: 

It is still unfathomable to me that the federal government took children away from their parents without a system for reunification, that some of those children may never see their parents again. 

Even if this were only one child it would be outrageous and egregious. Unfortunately, it is more than one.

Ironically, Trump started his hideous "family-separation policy” — which is, at the very least, Nazi-like — down in El Paso:

From July to October 2017, the Trump administration ran what the DHS called a "pilot program" for zero tolerance in El Paso. Families were separated, including families that were seeking asylum, and children were then reclassified as "unaccompanied" and sent into a network of shelters with no system created to reunite them with their parents.

If that doesn’t shock you, maybe you need to read it again. Here, let me help you:

The United States, under this president, ran an unpublicized program of kidnapping children from Immigrants trying to cross the southern border, at least some of them legally seeking asylum, then deliberately changing the status of the children to hide the fact that they had parents, and then hiding the kids in a "network of shelters with no system created to reunite them with their parents.”

The intent seemed to be scare the crap out of any invaders from the south into staying away from us, and especially not to bring their children, at least if they wanted to ever see them again.

And by the way, how’d that “deterrence” theory work out?

Government data from 2018 suggests that the family separation policy did little to deter migrants from crossing the US border illegally.

Yet it's still going on today, whether by pretended or actual incompetence.

And where does it all stand now? How many kids remain un-reunited with their families?

A followup government report released in January 2019, revealed that while HHS had previously said that the total number of children separated from their parents was 2,737, a new investigation revealed that the actual number of separated children was several thousand higher, with the exact number unknown due to poor record keeping. 

HHS is not able to identify or count children who were released from the government’s custody before officials started identifying separated families. 

Following a court ruling in 2019, government officials stated that identifying all children would require a joint effort of 12 to 24 months duration led by a team of officials representing HSS, ICE and CBP.

In other words, nobody seems to know right now how many kids were separated, but they promise to have the answer within maybe a year or two.

I guess the people who need to be outraged about this, the people who, one would think, would be demanding heads roll, are out sick, suffering from Trump Fatigue. Score Trump 1, and the rest of us 0.

Meanwhile, what is the administration doing about it in response to critics?

We’ll start with one such critic, Elijah Cummings, Democratic chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, blasting Kevin McAleenan, Trump’s Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, about living conditions of migrant mothers and children in border camps:

Outlining additional areas where McAleenan has offered a different account than government watchdogs, Cummings said he was troubled to hear DHS painting a rosier picture of its work at the border. 

“And therefore, I guess — you feel like you’re doing a great job, right?” Cummings asked. 

McAleenan responded his department was “doing our level best,” before being cut off again. 

“What does that mean? What does that mean? When a child is sitting in their own feces, can’t take a shower?” Cummings said, his voice shaking. “Come on man. What’s that about? None of us would have our children in that position.”

Then, on Saturday morning, Fox News Channel attempted to change the subject by countering Cummings's rage with a “what-aboutism” report from some young woman appearing to be a Baltimore local “citizen’s journalist” who showed us a video of trash outside and inside an abandoned apartment in Cummings’s home district.

Trump happened to be watching, and his resulting tweet was the start of his campaign against Cummings, apparently calculated to weaken the influence of one of his main congressional critics.

All of which should remind us of what Trump wanted us to forget, that all the damage from the White House’s family separation policy is still out there!

Thanks to Trump and his evil minions, some kidnapped kids are still sitting in their own feces and being denied a shower, while others have been placed in American foster homes, and while others, for all we know, are being rented out by human traffickers.

Yet, not only did the criminals say it may take one to two years to find out how many kids they sucked into their clutches — meaning, some of the kids they stole are gone for good, whether through simple incompetence or evil intent, and nobody seems to be seriously considering putting the bastards behind this in prison.

Maybe we need to — right now, while we’re thinking about it — take the names of any government employees who were involved in the commission of these crimes (who are possibly assuming they will get away with it on the grounds that "they were just following orders”) for use in whatever trials will be held after this crowd of thugs eventually loses power.

Response to The Man’s Word

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Man's Word)

“The cognitive linguist George Lakoff said the word 'invasion' was a potent one for Mr. Trump to use because of what it allowed him to communicate. 'If you’re invaded, you’re invaded by an enemy,' he said. 'An invasion says that you can be taken over inside your own country and harmed…'”

The weird thing is, we think of “invaders” as people who want to break into the country to do it some harm, whereas, in this case, the invaders are apparently families, coming here to improve their lives and contribute to the country’s well-being, while the people who are doing harm to the country are already living here. (And you know who you are!)

Daryl Johnson is right about Trump, as was Charles Blow in yesterday’s column. You can demand that Trump stop talking about “invaders” and such, but trying to convince him to be more careful of what he says kind of misses the point.

For one thing, I actually don’t want Trump to wake up some morning and become a good guy, since everybody will still know he got to be president of the United States by being both a lamebrain and a self-centered jerk, so-to-speak, and that will set a bad example for future generations, who need to know that you shouldn’t expect that doing bad stuff is the best way to get good stuff done.

And, in fact, it’s not necessarily Trump's rhetoric that keeps the alt-right active, it’s his very existence!

Since the very day after his election, American white power has found an environment much more welcoming to them, the most blatant example being news stories of white school students suddenly aware of the overnight change in America, openly harassing kids of color, shouting they should go back to where you came from.

White Supremacists now know they have a substantially friendlier audience for trying stuff they wouldn’t have been as likely to have tried under Obama.

But did Donald Trump make force them to be that way? I think that Charles Blow’s viewpoint covers this — that these two malevolent forces have been traveling on parallel roads, each just happening to look over and derive encouragement from seeing the other. To paraphrase the poet, neither of them needed a weatherman to tell them which way the wind was blowing.

Racists and the other deplorables are, for their own survival, a duplicitous group and so they easily overlook an equally disingenuous  president Trump occasionally disparaging them as he reads robotically from a teleprompter (so much so as to suggest that he’s mocking), since they know he’s being forced by circumstances to lie. If that weren’t the case, Trump wouldn’t do it, since it would risk losing his base. This is how evil survives in a world that’s mostly hostile to them.

Is Trump actually a racist? And am I suggesting that he’s a closet racist?

Sure. Why not. All we need to make that call is to remember one example of many.

Back in May of 1989, when he lived in New York City, Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in all four of the cities major newspapers, calling for the return of the death penalty after five minority teenagers, none of whom he knew from Adam, were accused of raping and badly beating a female jogger in Central Park:

"Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer ... Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will. ... How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!"

Maybe partly because of Trump’s ad, the five African Americans and Latinos were found guilty and served several years in jail, but twenty years later, were all exonerated by DNA evidence after another man confessed. They then sued the city, and settled for millions.

Was Trump ready to apologize? Nope. In fact, he doubled down, calling the settlement "a disgrace." "Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts”, he wrote. "These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.”

Has he ever apologized in the years since? No. If you add up all the cases like that one showing his attitude about minorities, you’re justified in concluding that Trump is indeed a racist, and whatever he says, with or without TelePrompter, doesn’t really matter. What matters is what he believes and what he is while in office, which is a racist, and if he’s trying to convince America he’s otherwise, he’s not doing a very good job.

And as for the trade war, I find it hard not to side with China.

Yes, they’ve been getting away with their shit for years, but I hate to reward our leadership for thinking that being an asshole is a way for our country to deal with it.

It just goes to show you, and it never occurs to you until it happens, that when you live under a tyrant, it's hard to know who your friends are.