Who Deserves to be called an Animal?

Can we agree on something? It is not good to dehumanize groups of people, and calling people “animals” is the definition of dehumanizing. While going right to the Holocaust is always discouraged, in order to avoid the past, we must learn the lessons of the past, and dehumanization is certainly one. Hitler and the Nazis were fond of calling the Jews animals and used the language and methods of pest exterminators (is it going beyond animals to call people insects or cockroaches?) for their “final solution.” Native Americans and Black Americans were considered animals (or even property, a step below an animal) by many of the whites who massacred and enslaved them, and Hitler is known to have admired the way the United States solved problems with Native Americans through massacres, stealing their lands, forced marches in which many died, and incarcerating them on “reservations” where many starved (how different is this from ghettos and concentration camps?). He also admired the Jim Crow laws that kept African Americans segregated and powerless.

In Trump’s rambling way of speaking, he recently spoke of people being deported as "animals." His supporters claim he was only referring to MS-13 gang members. But even in the most generous reading of his remarks, he is attributing to anyone even suspected of being associated with the gang as an animal. It is more likely that he was painting illegal immigrants as if they were largely hordes of criminal gang members invading our southern border when he said, “We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy.”

It’s not so different than what he said when he announced his candidacy by saying, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.…They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re…. bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

It’s worth noting that illegal immigrants caught having committed a violent crime in our country  are prosecuted and serve time in our prisons. They are not immediately deported to attempt to return to commit more crimes, so presumably the “animals” Trump is referring to either didn’t commit violent crimes here or weren’t caught committing them.

Today I read a column by conservative columnist Marc Thiessen (Democrats’ Dishonesty…6/1 in WAPO, 6/4 in Gazette-Mail) defending Trump’s remarks and criticizing Pelosi for objecting to calling people animals by saying “We’re all God’s children.” He argues, among other things, that if you extend that humanity to members of MS-13, you must also extend it to Hitler and other murdering dictators. I’m not Christian, so correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that exactly what Jesus wanted?

At the risk of offending animals (after all, they generally don’t kill except for food or in self-defense), let’s stipulate that some people do deserve to be called animals for their inhumane behavior.

So we can agree that various murderers, dictators, and terrorists act like animals (we might even extend this to some toddlers we know), but what group of people deserves to be called animals by the President of the United States? This is the same man who didn’t want to lump all the “alt-right” marchers at Charlottesville together and criticize them, saying, “…not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me….You also had some very fine people on both sides.”

When Trump is finally off the American political stage (may it be soon, please!) and the damage he has done to our country and the world is fully understood, I wonder how Trump’s many defenders will explain the self-imposed blindness that leads them to, among many other things, fail to criticize a racist who sees so much of humanity as less than human while criticizing a woman who asks them to remember that everyone is a “child of God.”

Will Clinton or Trump Help Families of Murder Victims?

A mother or wife who has lost a child or a spouse to a shooting steps up to the podium, briefly identifies herself and describes the promising life that has been cut short. She tells the audience that the candidate she supports will stop more senseless killings like this one and the crowd, sympathetically cheers their courage. Clinton or Trump? Both. 

Clinton has brought to the stage families of African Americans who have died at the hands of police and Trump the mothers and spouses of those killed by undocumented immigrants.

Are the candidates using these families for crass political gain or are they giving voice to their grief in order to highlight a grievous wrong that they intend to fix as president? And is there moral equivalence in the solutions they espouse?

Because I support Clinton and abhor Trump, my knee jerk reaction was that there is no equivalence, and that there is something untoward in one white woman after another coming to the stage to name the Latino criminal responsible for a death. But, I asked myself, why was that different than the black women who came to the stage to talk about their children or spouses? 

The answer may have come slowly, but it came. There is equivalence in the pain these family feel, but there is no equivalence in the solution the candidates offer to solve the problem their family members’ deaths represent.

“There's no evidence that immigrants are either more or less likely to commit crimes than anyone else in the population," says Janice Kephart, a researcher for the Center for Immigration Studies. This fact flies in the face of Trump’s insinuations that immigrants from Mexico are primarily criminals. Roughly 2-3% of Americans may commit a violent crime. Yet in order to prevent violent crime of those who might commit it within the population of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States Donald Trump proposes on most days to deport all eleven million, and on some days to deport immediately any that have been arrested for anything and decide later what to do about the rest.

In order to reduce the shooting of blacks by police, Hillary Clinton proposes to increase training for police departments on the use of force and to help them buy body cameras so that after an incident police can be either prosecuted or exonerated based on hard evidence rather than witness testimony only.

So, on one hand, disrupt the lives of millions of people including millions of innocent women and children, some of whom are American citizens, and on the other hand spend some money to help communities improve their police forces. Where is the moral equivalence?

And for the record, while Clinton doesn’t specifically address violent crime by undocumented immigrants, she does plan to focus resources on detaining and deporting those individuals who pose a violent threat to public safety and reduce gun violence by getting more illegal guns off our streets and keeping guns out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them by closing the gun show loophole and expanding background checks. Hillary has plans that will keep our country safe while preserving our freedom and our unique status in the world as a nation of immigrants. Trump would neither keep us safe nor keep us great. Trump’s America is like no America we have every seen.

Have We No Sense of Decency?

The United States is schizophrenic. Okay, maybe it just has what used to be called a split personality. In recent years this condition has been reduced to the words Red and Blue. Since I identify as Blue, anything I say about the Red side is suspect. Probably, however, since most of my friends and relatives are Blue, I am just preaching to the choir. 

On one side we have those who want low taxes for all including the super rich, less government regulation, strong borders and limited immigration, free and unlimited access to guns, lower spending on all social programs: health care, education, transportation, scientific research, and greater spending on the military along with a generally more robust interventionist foreign policy.

On the other side, the opposite.

On both sides we have a culture of fear and distrust of government, except when the government is in the control of their side, and even then, there is a growing percentage who distrust government regardless of which side has control. Many Americans identify with groups whose goal seems to be to destroy or dismantle most of the functions of government such as the Tea Party, Patriot Movement, and Libertarians. I couldn’t find evidence of an organized leftist group that wants to destroy the government, but those on the Red side see programs such as the Affordable Care Act and efforts at Immigration Reform and gun control as the destruction of the “American Way of Life.” 

Increasingly, therefore, there is a feeling that the other side is “Anti-American” or at least acting in ways that are counter to established American values.

And that’s how I’ve felt since the anti-Syrian, anti Immigrant response to the Paris attacks from Red state governors and congressmen. 

I am ashamed of the news coming out of the United States regarding these issues. It boggles my mind that over half the states’ governors have requested that Syrian refugees be kept out of their states. It drives me crazy to hear supposedly serious candidates for president proclaim that no amount of vetting could be adequate to verify that a Syrian refugee is not coming here to cause us harm. 

There oughta’ be a law (I’m not serious) against that kind of fear mongering. I wonder when the harassment and discrimination, possibly worse, of Syrians and other immigrants or even long time citizens who may look less than white or vaguely Arab will begin.

I shouldn’t be surprised after the fear and panic some of these same so-called leaders encouraged in the face of the outbreak of Ebola in Africa. Remember the hysterical declarations and efforts to keep people from any of the affected countries from coming here? Where are the outbreaks they predicted?

The fact is that anyone can become radicalized and become a terrorist in this age of social media and slick recruiting videos. Putting refugees of war in camps and refusing to integrate them into any kind of society or allow them any opportunity to have a decent life is a recipe for creating terrorists. 

To paraphrase Jack Welch to Anti-Communist crusader Senator Joe McCarthy when he was using a Senate investigative committee to accuse them, costing many their jobs and reputations, “Have you, at long last, sir, no sense of decency?” Have we, as Americans, no sense of decency? Are we so afraid that our only response to tragedy is an impulse to send troops, to send bombers, to seal our borders?