June 19, 2018
I will spare you and myself the audio clip of children, separated at the border from their parents and placed in cages, crying to the point of hysteria. I will not spare us the pictures below, because they speak to the cruelty, the sadism of all the acts perpetrated in connection with the government’s immigration crack down.
These pictures are of rosaries confiscated from those crossing the border before they are imprisoned. The rosaries are of no material value, made of plastic beads and string. They cannot be used as weapons. California inmates in up to level 3 security prisons (one step shy of max) are allowed to have them. There’s no reason to throw them in the garbage except cruelty.
Here is the whole story:
Irrespective of all the lies, explanatory falsehoods, of proud insistence dished out by the various governmental actors in these last days, for me the most difficult fact to live with is this: more than 50% of all Republicans support the internment and separation of children from their parents. In facilities that confine movement, 20 to a cage, with lights on for 24 hours, and a no-touch policy that prohibits workers from touching crying and desolate, disoriented children. With no intention to facilitate reunification at some point. And with referrals to the holocaust that point to the differences which they feel justify their action (Sessions: Well the Nazis didn’t allow the Jews to leave the country.)
The core issue among so many Americans in the end boils down, here as in so many other areas, to deeply seated racism. Brown children and their brown parents are so close to animals that they might as well belong in cages. Or cages might as well be used as a deterrent (which turns out not to be working if you look at the factual numbers) to keep the country white.
I refer you back to an article by Adam Serwer from last year that I cited once before:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-nationalists-delusion/546356/
Trumpism emerged from a haze of delusion, denial, pride, and cruelty—not as a historical anomaly, but as a profoundly American phenomenon. This explains both how tens of millions of white Americans could pull the lever for a candidate running on a racist platform and justify doing so, and why a predominantly white political class would search so desperately for an alternative explanation for what it had just seen. To acknowledge the centrality of racial inequality to American democracy is to question its legitimacy—so it must be denied.
Act.
Sara Lee
Concur, of course, in all the points you made. Sessions’ remark that the Nazis didn’t allow the Jews to leave is particularly “rich,” isn’t it? What a pack Trump/Sessions/Miller/Kelly are!
Gloria
Why aren’t we all out in the streets in MASSIVE numbers protesting?? In every city large and small across this country. Enough, finally, ENOUGH.