Like most of the rest of the world, I’ve been watching the uprisings on the streets of Iran. The middle-class is up in arms and being met with government arms. Thousands of citizens were killed in the streets. Hundreds threatened with hangings.
The Rial is hardly worth a Dinar anymore. Purchasing power struggles against a forty-two percent inflation rate. Who can afford food or rent? The government cracks down on the citizenry with abandon, irrespective of the validity of complaints. Up to a point, anyway.
President Trump threatened the government of Iran with an unspecified show of force if it hanged anyone, and they didn’t. Score one for Donald?
And again, like most of the rest of the world, I’ve been
watching squads of masked military-dressed ICE officers in Minneapolis, beating
American citizens, killing citizens, shooting them for no reason, breaking into homes without
warrants, pulling foreign looking individuals out of their cars, threatening
folks with deportation without due process, and just generally acting
differently than you would expect from an American police force. They aren’t
quelling the mobs; they are the mob.
President Trump’s Department of Justice is threatening to hold criminal investigations against the governor of Minnesota and the city’s mayor because they are pleading with the government to reduce the rhetoric, the meanness, and the rule by armed force-level federal police.
This is why I am confused. Our Dear Leader is supporting those who protest against their government in Iran, but at the same time, he and his administration are opposing those who protest against the un-American and cruel activities of our government. Measure for Measure seems to elude the federal brain.
Let’s be clear about what needs to be done and not done. The idea of getting rid of ICE is lunacy. We, the country, need a group responsible for enforcing immigration laws. Until recently, ICE has acted responsibly. What does make sense, however, is to stand down those wholly untrained thousands of people who are scaring the populace and put them through a revised proper training program. Somehow, as I watch them operate in the streets of our cities, I get the impression that they are being trained by veteran military personnel, rather than by highly trained police forces. I assume it is not a coincidence that they are dressed as military warriors and armed like soldiers of war. It scares the hell out of the people in the streets.
To oversimplify the thought, military tactics are designed to kill the enemy, while police are asked to protect and serve. That is a difference too large to be ignored. ICE agents need to be screened in the same manner as local police candidates and trained in the same way.
Senator Stephen Douglas favored slavery. Abraham Lincoln opposed it. In their famous Peoria debate on October 6, 1854, Lincoln declared that he hated it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. And then he said: “I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world – enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites – causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many good men amongst ourselves into an open way with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty – criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”
Lincoln, as usual, has words and meaning for the ages. Once more, it is time to summon our better angels. ICE alone is making a mockery of the American way. The world watches a once-strong democratic republic lapse into just another country ruled by the whims of a strongman, regardless of the rationality of the decisions made. The longer it stands, the more hypocritical we look, and the less democracy resembles the shining light on the hill.
The world sees a nation whose legislative branch only functions to ratify what its party’s leader wants and oppose whatever the other party wants. They see a Supreme Court that has bought into the strong president concept and approved nearly every case he brought to the bench. They see masked goon-acting militia in the streets, fully masked, harassing the citizens and disappearing people. How can it do anything but remind the world of Argentina’s “disappearing” people, or Soviet gulags, or China’s Cultural Revolution? We watch every day as a little of America is snipped away, and the next day a little more.
So what are we going to do? Sitting still isn’t an acceptable reaction to what is happening around us. So, taking action seems like the only solution.
We can write our senators and representatives. Too much work, you say. Download the 5 Calls app to your phone. Write a short note, and it sends it to all of your legislators. Attend the No Kings marches. No administration can overcome the protests of twelve million people.
Take videos of unlawful police action in your neighborhood and send them to local TV stations. Join Indivisible to keep up on what is happening in the country that shouldn’t be happening.
We should recognize that too many news outlets have a mission to influence their users rather than to report the news unvarnished. We know that Fox News is ultra-right-wing, and MS Now is ultra-left-wing, especially the talking heads. The same is true of podcasts. Try to find one that is unbiased. Listen to the news broadcast from Germany, England, or even Korea. They tend to cover world news better than U.S. news outlets. We can search for truth rather than what we want to hear. Democracy relies on a well-informed population. Let’s be that.
Let’s not be confused about what is happening in our country.
