“WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Tuesday took another significant step to discourage migrants from seeking asylum, issuing an order that could keep thousands of them in jail indefinitely while they wait for a resolution of their asylum requests.”
Imagine if, in the Sound of Music, once they climb over that mountain to freedom in Switzerland, the Swiss then stopped them, dragged the Von Trapp children out of their parents arms terrified and screaming, and threw everyone in cages with no end in sight. That is now who America is.
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America’s response to the 9/11 attacks marked a turning point in our behavior. While we have had specific moral failures in the past (such as our genocide against American Indians and slavery), we have also made some attempt to admit those as failures and move on. Few Americans today argue that we should re-institute slavery or force any American Indian tribe to take a forced march across a hostile wilderness.
The 9/11 attacks presented Americans with a moral and spiritual test — a test that we failed. We had an opportunity to show ourselves and the world (including the Muslim world) that we are a nation of law and justice that resists the temptations of bigotry and xenophobia that every episode like 9/11 presents. We squandered that opportunity.
We instead behaved precisely the way the AQ plotters wanted us to behave. For the first time in my sixty-plus year memory, we rounded up anybody and everybody with a Muslim-sounding name, shredded their right to counsel or to even know why they were being held, and took them away (often in the dead of night) to secret prisons for arbitrary periods.
The administration of George W. Bush ordered kidnappings, torture, abuse, and murder against these same scapegoats — when we Democrats regained the power to investigate those crimes against humanity in 2006, we did absolutely nothing. Thank you, Ms. Pelosi.
The current scapegoats are immigrants. Men, women, and children fleeing tyranny and worse in their native homelands — people who are protected by international law (never mind simple human decency). Again our deplorable Republicans shred the basic human rights of these people. Here we are building concentration camps and cages to imprison tens of thousands of people. I say “deplorable Republicans” because these shameful policies enjoy nearly universal support among self-professed Republicans, especially in the heartland.
America is no longer the home of the free and the brave. We are now the world’s cesspool, sucking all who come near into a quicksand of hate, bigotry, cruelty, and greed.
We should ALL be ashamed that this is being done in our name. We should ALL be ashamed that our majority in Congress is doing absolutely NOTHING except cluck-clucking in photo-ops about the immoral and corrupt tyranny that has taken over our executive branch and too much of our society.
America has been the Notre Dame of the free world for nearly a century. That cathedral is ablaze, and our government sits idly on the sideline and poses for the media instead of joining the fight to save what is left of the structure.
We CAN at least try to stop this. The fact that we don’t is our own failing.
It’s who we were when we brought people here from Africa and sold them into slavery and separated children from their mothers and fathers, and husbands from their wives. It’s who we were when we mandated that Native American children be educated apart from their families in boarding schools.
It’s who we are when we are the the only developed nation in the world that doesn’t have paid maternity leave, Get those babies away from their mothers ASAP so that mom can get back to work at crap wages that will support a multi-million dollar CEO’s salary. It’s all about the economy, the DOW, jobs! Screw the kids and families.
Let’s not kind ourselves. It’s who we now are, and who we’ve always been.
It’s who we are. Trump and the Republicans just say it out loud.
If I had my way we would not have specific “asylum” status since I would welcome any person not a threat to public health or safety just cuz, which would render moot any need to prove that you need asylum.