My heart is heavy with shame, grief, and fear, as I sit down to write this, on the 4th of July, 2018, a day when I used to celebrate pride in my country. What the Trump administration is doing in our name with our tax dollars on our southern border, under its policy of “zero tolerance,” is shameful, horrifying, and terrifying. In the recent weeks since heroic investigative reporters revealed what is going on, (i.e., the forced separations of children from their parents, the incarceration of children, losing track of children, the failure to re-unite children with their parents), I have been almost paralyzed by this realization: my own country is committing inhumane, cruel human rights violations again.
I am ashamed of my country. Of course I know that my country has done terrible things in the past, from slavery and exterminating native Americans to putting Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps. I had, apparently naively, thought we were making slow progress on human rights. But not so.
I grieve for the children and for the parents. A great amount of evidence, both scientific and anecdotal, substantiates the developmental harm done to children separated from their parents, even when it is done “for their own good.” But just imagine it. Remember when you were a young child and imagine how you would have felt if you were forcibly taken from your parents and sent away to live with strangers, without knowing when or whether you would see your parents again. Imagine if your own child or grandchild were forcibly removed from you and taken to you knew not where and you did not know when or whether you would see them again. A horrible nightmare, right? Unbelievably cruel. How can anyone think this is a good idea? How can any Christian or believer in family values accept this situation?
And I am frightened. Can we really lose what’s left of our democracy? Can my country really take a turn towards fascism, oligarchy, or other form of dictatorship? Is it already too late to change things? The fact that at least half the country is apparently OK with treating other human beings this cruelly scares me deeply. About 40% actually approve!!??!! What else will they accept? Is this a test case to see what they will accept and thus a first step to even more human rights violations?
So writing this emotionally difficult. Poor me. So I do what I usually do and get analytical. What the hell is going on here?
One systemic problem that contributes to this appalling policy, it seems to me, is the creation and use of private, for-profit prisons. All prisons are paid for with our tax dollars, and our government should run all of them. The creation in the last few decades of privately owned, for-profit prisons, still funded by taxpayers, has had several negative consequences for us as a society. Once there are many prisons owned by corporations, then incarceration becomes a business and the owners have vested interests. Their vested interests, to have lots of people to incarcerate, means that they take the profits from their prison businesses to lobby the government and donate to elect politicians with a “law and order” philosophy. Social problems are “solved” by passing laws against certain behaviors. If homeless people sleeping on the street are a problem, then criminalize sleeping on the street, rather than dealing with the causes of homelessness or providing adequate housing. Apply this reasoning wherever possible, and the incarceration industry will continue to grow and prosper. Add incarcerating separated children and parents here without documents and their profits will soar.
And this brings me to the next systemic problem -- Citizens United. Once the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are “persons” with free speech “rights” and that spending money is a form of free speech, then money from the rich and the corporations poured into our political system. Members of the ruling class have spent decades consolidating their power through gerrymandering, voter suppression, anti-union legislation, distracting the populace with jokers like Trump and Fox “news,” dividing the populace with appeals to prejudices, and scaring the populace with communism in the 1950s and “Muslim terrorists” now. After Citizens United, they have been free to spend as much money as they like to create a government that favors their own interests, and they now have far more money than the rest of us put together, thanks to the Bush and Trump tax cuts. Class warfare exists, and we lost.
It almost goes without saying that racism is a major systemic factor in “zero tolerance.” There are thousands of undocumented immigrants from Europe, most of whom are white, and they are unaffected by “zero tolerance.”
Well, analysis is not helping. Now I feel despair, too. Let me fan the embers of my dying hope. If we all worked really hard to get out the vote for the midterm elections this November and if that resulted in the Republicans losing control of the Senate, then maybe the agenda of the people behind Trump could be slowed down. There it is, our only hope. Democrats, progressives, centrists, and those against these human rights violations have to vote in overwhelming numbers to overcome the effects of gerrymandering, fear-mongering, Russian interference, fake news, etc.
Here’s the main thing I do to feel better: I donate as much as I possibly can to the American Civil Liberties Union, MoveOn.org, Move to Amend, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has a program to train volunteer lawyers to help undocumented immigrants. Other possibilities for donations: https://www.texastribune.org/2018/06/18/heres-list-organizations-are-mobilizing-help-separated-immigrant-child/ [Note: This wonderful article that lists organizations helping the separated children had 8 comments, 3 positive, and 5 casting aspersions. See why I despair?]
I also call and write constantly to my elected representatives, but both my US Senators are Democrats, so I’m preaching to the choir, and my congressman is fat-cat, right-wing, Russia-loving Dana Rohrabacher. I also write to Trump, ha ha. I plan to write to the Hague to ask the International Court to investigate us for human rights violations. And I am starting to experiment with Resist Bot.
The entire implementation of “zero tolerance” should be investigated by Congress. Congress should investigate why it was implemented so secretively, who benefits from it, why people are not allowed in to see how the children are being treated, where are the children, whether adequate records are being kept, and what is the process for re-unification. I suspect there is no plan for re-unification, despite the court ordering the families to be reunited. What is the plan for the incarcerated children? Are they going to keep them in institutions for years or fly them to some central American country and just leave them there? Congress should demand answers to these and other questions.
I used to think Trump was just a distraction to keep everyone riled up by his ridiculousness, while the wealthy quietly got more things in their favor enacted. But now I think he is actually more evil than that. With Trump and his administration, the confluence of malevolence and incompetence is breath-taking. I always liked so-called Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. But with Trump it always seems to be both. Both are very dangerous to our country, but at times I think his incompetence might eventually work in our favor. Grasping at straws?
Invariably, in the middle of the night, I end up reminding myself that feeling hopeless and scared is self-defeating, that the ruling class benefits from such feelings in the populace, that I must have courage and faith, and that continuing to resist is the whole point.
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