What Indifference Hath Wrought

It is easy for the common man, or even a not so common man like Donald Trump, to think fixing immigration is easy.  It seems easy, right?  Citizens only.  Legal entry only. You know where I am going with this. 

The fact is it is exceedingly difficult.  What we are seeing today at our borders is what others have feared and sought to avoid.  At another extreme we might see a massive exodus from throughout the south pouring into our country with riots in the streets, though I have seen no evidence of any politician or group advocating for that open of a border.  Rather, we have children in cages, families dying in the river, a government agency gone thug, and a division of epic proportions in American society.

At the root of all Donald Trump support is our immigration problem.  Yes, the typical Republicans who are either rich or believe they will be rich and therefore want laissez faire economic policies, are mum about all the crimes, misdemeanors and indiscretions so long as the cronyism flourishes and our institutions are rendered powerless, which in turn will be used to support the idea of abolishing them.  Those who vote solely on abortion are also on board.  In their case the opposite is true.  They tolerate the border situation because they see liberal thinkers as against God and capable of killing innocents on whim or worse. 

Still, immigration is the primary wedge.  In the past our Presidents have embraced numerous policies all in the name of curbing or eliminating illegal immigration.  

• Nixon closed the border which did not impact immigration at all, only traffic.
• Carter was strict on immigration. 
• Reagan naturalized 3 million immigrants and hoped they would become Republicans.  
• George H W Bush did nothing, (for an entire Presidency.)  
• Bill Clinton required agencies to communicate in foreign languages, assured Mexico there would be no mass deportations while also asserting our right to enforce our immigration laws, opposed English as an official language and advised of an America 50 years hence when there would be no majority race. 
• George W Bush oversaw a decrease in the average time it took to deport someone of 100 days to 20, ended catch and release, and employed the use of fences and advanced technologies.  That said, on the other side of things he created a guest worker program, softened the GOP position on English as official language and worked to ensure immigrant children received the same free lunch benefits citizen children did. “We must also find a sensible and humane way to deal with people here illegally,” Bush said.  
• Obama oversaw record deportation, employed drones to monitor the Mexican border, connected xenophobia to joblessness, supported DREAMERs, instituted DACA, and sought comprehensive reform, which is complicated and has a multitude of moving parts.

These are men who made it to the position considered the most powerful in the world.  They had considered responses to the problem with varying degrees of success and failure.

What is different about Trump?  Trump sat around his tower as citizen in New York City and armchair Presidented for years.  On Immigration he imagined it an easy fix.  Build a wall.  Stop all Muslims.  Punish our neighbors for their role.  His policy is all stick, no carrot.  It is also utterly untenable.  Had the administration thought this through, like chess, not checkers-had they planned their steps, calculated the outcomes, planned how to respond to those outcomes, imagined what came of those measures, and so on, perhaps they would not have moved so haphazardly.  

Instead they considered a social experiment with the American society as petri dish.  They tested the Muslim ban in the courts, (all while trying to stack as many courts across the land as possible with judges of a similar world view, which it bears saying is not the view of most Americans.)  Trump has tried so hard to have a wall built across our southern border.  Many promises, all unfulfilled.  The President has worked hard at maintaining support, banging the drum at his unprecedented rallies and hiring advocates only to high office.  He has been unbending if unsuccessful. 

What we can know for certain is that it is a complicated problem.  Previous administrations surely considered these obtuse actions the Trump administration has enacted but they shied away from them because of the perceived risk.  The Trump administration proceeded because they are not thoughtful nor empathetic.  Now we have people in cages at our southern border, some who are malnourished, sick, alone, afraid, drinking from toilets, sleeping in disaster blankets, because it is a disaster. 

We don’t even talk about the real reason these people seek refuge in America.  Yes, they are on the run from rampant crime and violence in their countries.  Yes, they seek a better life with real opportunities to labor and reap the benefits of self-determination in the form of stability, health and safety.  The root problem goes much deeper however.  Why is the southern hemisphere dogged by instability?  Why is El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guyana, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Haiti, Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil so poor?  The reasons are myriad and the United States is implicated.  From the No Transfer policy of 1811 to the Monroe Doctrine, (1823,) we have sought to render Latin American countries militarily weak while cashing in on their natural resources. There are examples of more aggressive intervention as well, like when we aided in the overthrow of the socialist administration of Salvador Allende in Chile in favor of the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet.  In effect we have worked to keep all of our neighbors to the south relatively weak and open to our brands of commerce. Did we think of the subsequent inequality or how the poor and oppressed would seek emigration in the wealthy north?  Who knows?  (This to say nothing of the morality of our policies.)  

What we do know is it is here and it is now.  The coalition of support Trump has is marginal.  While it was enough to win the 2016 election based on the American value of all votes not being equal, (a.k.a., the electoral college,) Trump received 2.865 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, it is tenuous as many Americans have stopped supporting him based on any number of reasons ranging from 24 sexual assault or misconduct allegations to trade wars to support for murderous regimes to babies in cages.  The wall and the pursuit of the Trump administration's crude means of achieving an unattainable end are like an albatross around Donald Trump's neck.  This is the hill he is dying on.  He chose it because in his simple mind he thought this would be easy to achieve and he has chosen authoritarianism over all else, so he only knows how to double down when he is faced with a setback.  

Trump, however, is not the real loser.  We elected him.  We bear responsibility and we will suffer the effects, the most obvious and immediate one being the division in our society.  Can we overcome this? Can we heal?  I don't think either side cares right about now.  40% of those who vote in the 2020 election will vote for Trump.  When he loses they will be pissed and energized.  They will despise the next President and begin criticism and propaganda against him or her upon inauguration.  They will buy whatever the Koch Brothers and Sinclair and Fox News sells them from pizza parlor underage sex rings to hysteria over emails.

None of this bodes well for our democracy and there is only one antidote: education.  When we agree as Americans to fund the best public schools in the world, including higher education, we can have an informed electorate.  We are a long way from that, but change is always slow.  If you think of how far we have come on social issues to say nothing of the technological advances in the world, change can be scary.  

I watched a documentary movie about Clarence Avent and in it he said Obama was going to lose the election right up until he didn't, and I get that.  That is like coming a long way, baby.  So now when I think about children in cages I think it might be a reaction to the speed of change.  Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, right?  Trump's minority of fearful, white, male Americans, anti-abortion voters and those who can look past the all the indignities in the name of their own financial interests, remain energized.  They typically feel left out and marginalized by the American political process but they feel like their voice is loud and proud right now.  They matter right now and it is preferable by far to being ignored.  After all, as Elie Wiesel said, the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.  

Defeating Trump in 2020 will not be enough to restart the advancement many of us strive for where we left off.  The Supreme Court is unbalanced. Trump appointed judges are being approved at alarming rates.  They're organized.  They have the Senate.  Getting back to the evolution of our kind will take time.  

It will be about education and the long game.  Let's  gain universal agreement that we have to value education as a society so much it is untouchable and always well funded.  We have to pay for it.  

Many Americans, perhaps even a majority, recognize the GOP is inclined to give tax breaks to the wealthy class in spite of the fact trickle down economics has been so thoroughly debunked.  Many Americans, perhaps even a majority, recognize the GOP is the party of fear, xenophobia, the stick, authoritarianism, austerity, white men controlling women's bodies, favors for favors, gerrymandering, private prisons, gutting the voting rights act...  (Why do Republicans always seek to limit the number of eligible voters?  It is as simple as what Bill Clinton said. The demographics of the United States are changing and no amount of white supremacy will stop that.  When they keep people of color from voting, through gerrymander or by census question, [fear,] they stem the tide, but they can't stop the tide.  They delay the inevitable is all.  The changes I am in favor of are coming.  I already know that.  It is just a matter of if they will happen in 20 years time or 100 years but they are coming.) These policies of division, fear and hate do not speak to our younger generations.  They are not so inclined to fear and hate.  

A truly educated society would never vote for Donald Trump.  So that is where we need to start, today.  Education will tamp down the various fears the GOP sells their agenda on.  Our youth are already less inclined to fear the other, the different.  Joseph de'Maistre said, "Every nation gets the government it deserves."  We are there.  We have been asleep at the wheel, too unwilling to pay our teachers and fund our public schools.  We valued it at one time but the GOP worked to erode public confidence in its value or that we were doing it well.  

This is where we start.  When we achieve an informed and educated society we will have one that is difficult to fool.  Education can be inoculation against the fear that causes division..

If I Could Relive a Day of My Life

I don't have a lot of memories of my mother because we were apart.  I remember visits to Terminal Island or Pleasanton.  Cold visits in cordoned areas to mingle with inmates were not memorable even when the inmate was your mother.  There was a time when i was 18 however.  She had been out of prison and trying to get her life together with a man 30 years her senior.  She was supposedly clean but her relationship with heroin and methadone was a palette of smeared colors and images, overlapping and smudging one another into a mural of indistinct confusion.  

My Aunt and Uncle told me my mom was coming to take my brother and I to Knott's Berry Farm.  It was an amusement park.  We rode the rides and she waited.  I did not know how to act.  She was my mom and I longed for her but I did not know how to be close to her.  I went through the motions.  I laughed and smiled and enjoyed the trappings of the park.  I didn't know what to say.  At the end of the night we stopped at Coco's back in town before being dropped off at our home with our Aunt and Uncle.  My mom disappeared to the restroom for a long time.  When she finally returned my brother and i had mostly finished our meals.  She apologized and sat down to her salad.  A moment later her head dropped towards the table and her face fell into the salad.  I was 18.  My mom gathered herself and woke up...some.  She drove us home.  I didn't know.  Maybe I should have but I did not.  I always believed every word she said to me.  When she said she was not on heroin I knew it was true.  Only later when my Aunt and Uncle commented did it occur to me she may have lied, even to me.  

If I could relive that day I would tell her I loved her so much she would not need heroin.  I just know she was looking for love in that drug.  I know she was looking for my love in that heroin.  I know the years and years apart had taken a toll on her.  I know she sought love in all kinds of ways.  I needed her love too.  We were both emptier from not having one another.  It was commensurate.  If I could relive that day I would tell her I love her on the ride to the park, at the log ride, in the old west section of the park, at the games and the roller coasters.  I would tell her on the ride home, too, and at Coco's, and she would feel the warmth and that thing from inside her veins that made her disappear into the ether where memories of a son's love and of bonds unattended are too hazy to know or feel would be obsolete and she would stay clean and the overdose that came  one year later would never need to happen because she would feel loved and contented.

4 stanzas from bygone days

faith, in troubled times


my flower, my friend
my ray of giddy sunshine in this place i call imperfection
you give me hope like a serum
like a shot of love to inoculate my world weary soul
you give me beer bongs of hope

my song, my lover
my breath of joyful air in this moment of truth and consequences
you inflate me like an airbag
like a jolt of oxygen to pump up my medulla obligated
you give my life animation

my companion, my poem
my funny little rock 'n' roller fronting our funky quartet
you guide me like a star
like a bic lighter of trust illuminating my night skies
i believe in you

my sparrow, my baby
you are the last sound my ears will ever hear
you are the most recent thing i ever needed
you let me give when i have nothing to offer
my heart is your heart is my heart


http://michaeljjames.blogspot.com/2009/03/faith-in-troubled-times.html

A Stirring

You feel in the depth of you a stirring.  You drive in traffic to work and you feel this thing in spite of the ordinary that is your morning coffee, the freeway route so familiar and the dulcet tones of the podcast hosts as they reveal so many aspects of the invisible.

Oil men improving safety records by 85% by getting in touch with their emotions strikes you as so unrealistic.  Which oil executive would ever spend corporate dollars on such a program?  Still, the idea of rough men talking about their backgrounds with one another, opening up and trying to articulate what they felt as the children of the alcoholic, the impoverished, the dispossessed and so on, was more than intriguing.  America selling the idea of smiling to Russians via the opening of McDonald’s in Moscow, also touches a chord.  The man who was trained and later arrives in America to stay appreciates the smile, likes his new ways, but in the end he comes to see the smile as somehow hollow and this too, resonates with you.  Capitalism forces people to put up a front all day every day.  Customer Service jobs are emotional labor, which has a dark side.  People drink or learn to ignore the incongruity of smiling or acting 40 or more hours a week.

Your drive is unremarkable.  It is slower at parts and faster at others.  When your podcast ends you recall listening to Amy Winehouse at 2am on Saturday night with your closest friends in your living room.  You remember her voice and more, her phrasing.  You remember one of your friends comparing Amy Winehouse to Pat Benatar and how rude you were in making the point of there being no comparison.  He really is so anachronistic for the 70s, you think.  Pat Benetar.  Really…  You verbally scolded him knowing full well he simply was not familiar with Winehouse.  But Ms. Winehouse holds a special place in your heart these days for more reasons than her own tragic story. 

You flip your phone over to your Youtube app and speak Amy Winehouse’s name and Valerie into it.  You play Valerie and you play it loud.  The song permeates you on this day.  It eviscerates you wholly.  You see hear smell and feel your former lover in the soul of Amy Winehouse’s voice.  It stirs that thing in the pit of your stomach and as you close in on your office, amidst so many big rig trucks set much higher on the plane of the road, you let it go.  Slowly and softly at first it gurgles upward.  Your body moves from a strange inertia.  You sense the heat coming to your head.  You feel a congestion forming in your face.  Liquid settles into your eyes.  You realize it’s tears, it’s emotion.  You feel the convulsion of that first major surge and you nearly bark as tears burst forth as from a dam and roll down your face freely like released prisoners racing to sustenance. 

It feels so fucking good to cry, you think.  And so, you cry.  You look away from cars and passersby.  You wipe your face slyly and slightly.  And you cry.  And you miss that girl and you understand she is not yours and you have to let go.  You’re thankful you knew her though. Not because you needed to know another girl.  There have been plenty of relationships over the years-you’re not sure there is anything more to be learned from intimacy, at least, Eros intimacy.  This cry though.  This cry is life. 

Nothing makes you cry anymore.  It feels like an every couple of years sort of thing and you worry about those poisons you heard were in tears because of that study some 10 years ago.  Why does 10 years ago feel like yesterday? Surely that study is still valid.  Surely there is poison, physical, chemical, poison, in tears and surely it is good for the body to rid itself of these toxins and surely that is why this feels so fucking good.  You want to cry for about a day-and-a-half but you know the feeling won’t last.  Already as you think about the fact that this feeling, this ecstasy of depression, will too pass a new bump of sadness pulsates through you at the loss of the loss of the loss… 

Your profile on that change management assessment said you struggled with social bonds.  You feel social as anything.  You love a party.  You’re friendly.  You’re still a little angry at some of your best and oldest friends for letting the friendship go like a waterless lawn.  You’re still friends with them but there is a distance, a void of familiarity and ideas, a gap in dreams and fears that began in your 20s and like a tarred tree branch never grew back but also never got diseased.  You’re still friends after all. 

What is there to cry about anyways, you think?  If joy and sadness are opposite sides of the same stone and we can only feel them to the same degree then the absence of sadness is a sign, right?  I mean, what is it you want anyway?  Drama? 

You’re driving to work and there is no reason for reasons right now.  Tears are falling from your eyes, which are set on the road as you navigate the Pomona Freeway, like splashes of water from an overflowing pool.  They glide down your face and you wish you could see them on film.  You think your crying is art because you’re self-absorbed like that perhaps but also because you don’t move otherwise.  Your face is as placid as a painting, your brow in unfurled whatsoever, your body does not jerk or convulse in any visible way.  It drives and your eyes cry and you feel within you, deep down, a stirring.  You’re sad about this new time, happy about the ability to emote, relieved at the end of the salty tear drought and withdrawn at your own sense of alone, of singularity, of one.