As I approach the fifty thousand word mark in NaNoWrimo this month, something has been on my mind since the 9th.
I have been hearing reports on the news and on Facebook, as well as from co workers, about how little children in schools are terrorizing their peers. Telling them that they are going to deported because of their skin color or because of their first language. It is easy to say that this behavior is nothing more than the kids parroting what their parents are saying but I believe it is a sign of a bigger problem. Kids often act as recorders of what their parents say, we are all guilty of cussing in front of our kids by accident. Rarely do we sit down with our children and tell them what is okay to say and what isn’t. Even rarer, and this is the fault of my generation, do we lead by example which is the best way our children learn.
When i first heard of this behavior going on in school, i sat down with my son and told him it is not okay to say that someone will be deported because of the language they speak or the color of their skin. Surprisingly, I and my wife do lead by example because he said he already knew that and was defending some of those people at school. I told him that it would not be okay to start a fight about it but instead to grab a teacher or trusted adult to mediate the situation.
Here is where we can get involved as adults. Just because someone has a different skin color or learned a different primary language does not mean that they do not belong here. On top of that you have to realize that many of us are descendants of many immigrants, only native Americans can say that they have been here for longer than a few generations. Also we have to realize why many of them have come to america; it isn’t simply because this is the land of opportunity; it is a harbor against ethic cleansing and repression. Many of us would not be here if our ancestors did not flee a country they knew and understood for an unknown land far away.
Lets take the Latin Americans that have come here, legally and illegally, as an example. Many of them come from a part of mexico known as Juarez. In Juarez the government is either corrupt or powerless against the drug cartels. Thousands of people have already died there, if you think LA is bad, stay ONE NIGHT in Juarez. We are not going to stem the tide of illegal immigration by building a wall. The source of this problem is the drug cartels. Ironically the war on drugs has made them more powerful. Stopping the drugs coming here isn’t going to help and it has not helped for the last forty years. A different approach is needed to take the power out of their hands but that is a topic for another discussion.
Additionally the Mexican government will not take back many of these immigrants, not only because they don’t want to, but because many of the people fleeing here do not have criminal records and it would be a danger to put them back where they came from. If you want to stop the problem of illegal immigration, ignorance will not help, token steps and flimsy walls will not help. The drug cartels and human trafficking business in mexico have already dug sophisticated tunnels complete with ventilation systems to get drugs and humans across the border. We need to help the governments of the world solve their socioeconomic problems in a peaceful manner.
Now about this election; Trump got elected, Hilary Clinton gave the race to him after he got the electoral votes he needed. Protesting his election will not change this. Answering hate with hate will not solve any problem! If you have read Templar: Order and Chaos, you know that my personal belief is that we have to overcome our differences, we cannot do that with fear and hate.
If you must ask I did not vote for Trump. As I had said to a colleague of mine, as a joke, “all we can do now is sit back with a bowl of popcorn and watch the world burn.” remember we do elect our officials. Every two years we have an election, if you want to chance the government then do it through voting for your officials. do not believe the rumors of “If you don’t vote for one then you are voting for the other,” Which is spouted by the powers that be of BOTH parties. I say it to everyone, vote your conscience. I am a fiscally conservative BUT socially progressive individual. I believe in reproductive freedom, that people should marry who they love regardless of physical or perceived gender. People should be accepted for who they are. I may not believe in the christian god but I do believe that future generations will judge us based on how we treat the less fortunate and needy. We should treat the less fortunate with dignity and respect.
I have been hearing things like “Trump will repeal Roe V. Wade, take away the right to marry who we chose, will condone hate crimes,” among many other things. A lot of people seem to overestimate how much power a president really has. Some things he can do, executive orders and such. He might be able to ram something through congress that will cancel obama-care but i will say this to both sides of the argument: the damage is already done folks, leave affordable care act alone or take it away, our premiums will never go down. There are laws in place, that have been in place going as far back as world war 2 that allow the insurance companies to keep raping us. the Baye Dole act of 1980 allows drug companies to keep their patent for a even if they use NIH (publicly funded and paid for) funds to help develop the drug. Drug advertising convinces the public to go for more expensive drugs when the companies don’t have to prove that their new drug works better than an old one. Medical technology companies are protected by a law passed in the seventies that allow them to jack up the price of their equipment as the develop it. The people are not at fault either; mal-practice insurance has gone through the roof as law suits (a mixture of deserved and undeserved) soared in the nineties and recent times. Just like immigration, this problem is systemic. we need the government to take action and take away some of the anti portability laws of the forties, take away the right of insurance companies to lock in rates on hospitals, take away the right to file patents on anything that was funded with public money, and add a public insurance option to bring down the prices of premiums.
As far as the hate rhetoric, let me say this; Trump may have gotten away with hate speech during the election but if he publicly condones hate now he will be impeached faster than you can say “holy S#^~! On the other side there is some reason for concern. I have been comparing what he said to the Nazi’s since 2014 when i thought Trump was joking about the election. For those of you who think we will turn in you a new Germany, you are closer to right than you know. Where did Hitler get his Eugenics garbage; the USA. If you don’t believe me then Google 1904 & Eugenics. In the latter part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century we were spouting the same thing. There were even laws on the books that if people were convicted of certain crimes or were “mentally defective” then they would be sterilized. Back then the supreme court heard a case and found these laws unconstitutional. we narrowly averted becoming the so called “superior” race before world war 1.
Supreme court, that reminds me; Roe v. Wade! Law makers have been trying to take that down since the supreme court made history with that case. The closest they got was regulating it in certain states and those laws are being challenged as well. I think that law is pretty safe since there are many rulings behind it setting a precedent. You may say that Trump can put someone in there to sway the vote but Samuel Alito was also a conservative leaning judge and that still did not help. Once a judge is appointed to the supreme court it is really hard for them to be taken off of the bench. While that may scare some people it does allow them to vote their conscience despite what they promised to which president to get on the bench in the first place. Many presidents have been burned by their supreme court choices. Google that too. Those comparisons make a fascinating read.
Back to the deportation issue. I forgot to say this earlier but whenever someone says “English is the Offical language of the USA” I get upset. Officially, we have no official language; look it up. The one time we were going to pass a law to set an official language it was in the early eighteen hundreds and the language they were going for back then is GERMAN! We have no law on the books saying English is the Official language of our country. As a culture, we generally speak English, but if we want to be the enlightened people we pretend to be then maybe it is time we step up and start learning some of these other languages. I for one, want to learn Japanese on top of Spanish. I would also like to learn a little Brythonic, Galic, and Welsh despite the fact that visiting a potato eating country will probably kill me.
Anyway, off the soap box. Stay enlightened, stay open minded, keep reading, and stay tuned!
