A whole horde of desperate people have amassed at the border wall (On the Earth of DC Comics, the damn thing got built). However, the wall does not work as expected on different levels.
Ha! Ha! People in the United States trying to get out!
Into Mexico?!?!
Now, that's comedy.
Anyway....
In the latest turn of the coronavirus pandemic as the death toll continues to mount, Li'l Donnie Trump went back to the well to an old stand-by.
He signed an executive order to halt ALL immigration.
Which, you know, makes him happy. And Stephen Miller looked up from whatever hapless human neck he was sipping blood from to offer a grin of approval. Miller's dark strategems continue to proceed to his grim satisfaction.
The thing to remember about Trump and minions like Miller is their problem isn't with illegal immigration. Their problem is with any immigration. The white poorly educated racist base that forms the core of Trump's political power don't care if the brown skin person competing with them for jobs is here legally or not. The white poorly educated racist base only cares that the brown skin person is there at all.
Barack Obama's former White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel once said, "Never let a crisis go to waste." If there's something that you've wanted to do and a crisis will help get it done, then go for it.
Basically, Trump and Miller are not letting this pandemic crisis go to waste without using to further their anti-immigration agenda. Any constriction of any immigration is a win.
Of course we're not keeping the coronavirus out of the country at this point. COVID-19 is here, it's virulent and it's killing thousands of Americans. Shutting the door to all immigration is a blanket panacea to make it look like Trump is taking decisive action to protect the country. As far as helping the pandemic here in America, Trump's actions are pure theater. It's just a chance to do what Trump and Miller have always wanted to do and shut down the whole country from anyone getting in.
Given the severity of the disease here in the United States, it might be more logical for other countries to bar immigration from the United States.
We may need to escape into Mexico since Trump has declared war against the United States.
On one hand, Trump tells the various state governors begging for supplies to help fight the pandemic that getting those supplies is their responsibility, not his.
Then he turns around and undermines those same governors for their stay at home orders, sending out tweets to LIBERATE MICHIGAN! LIBERATE MINNESOTA! LIBERATE VIRGINIA!
Liberate? Dude, these are not states being held by hostile foreign powers like its some kind of version of Red Dawn. These are states where governors with little or no support from the federal government are trying to mitigate the effects of the coronavirus as best they can with stay at home orders.
Trump wants to avoid his responsibility for running the federal government by defaulting to governors on how to fight the virus but he wants to run rough shod on those same governors for doing what the CDC says is the best response to the virus, having people stay the hell away from each other.
Of course, Trump has his eye on the one thing that concerns him more than anything: his fucking re-election and he still thinks that if the economy is still ticking, he's got a shot.
It's that same thinking that prompted Trump's reluctance to accept the severity of the coming coronavirus epidemic. He wanted to keep businesses open and keep Wall Street happy.
But even the money changers in the temples of Wall Street understood something that Trump fails to grasp: sometimes in order to make money, you have to think about things beyond money.
Sick workers are bad for productivity. Sick workers cost money. Dead workers are not good for the economy.
Every time Trump shoved his head in the sand and said everything's fine and this whole thing would blow over come warm weather, Wall Street knew better and the markets began to tank. Wall Street needed assurances that the medical crisis was well in hand and those assurances were not there.
Those assurances are still not there. Despite efforts by Trump and other Republicans to get the country "open" again, business leaders are still cautious as the level of testing resources needed to assure the safety of their work forces and their customers is not sufficient.
While there is a push to re-open the economy in May, my former employer is keeping its Work From Home directives in place until July 15th. Other businesses are making similar decisions. Yes, businesses exist to make money but that's hard to do when workers and customers are still at significant risk of being sick and dying.
Trump doesn't understand this equation. To him, people are tools to push the levers of the economy that he thinks makes him look good. If some of them die, well, too bad. But people die of something every day and the business keeps on keeping on.
Trump can't conceive of life as other than transactional. If you're getting yours, money or power or whatever, nothing else matters.
His failure to recognize there is more to life than these transactions cost him in 2018. If the base line for Trump's success is a strong economy, Republicans should've held the House of Representatives in the 2018 mid-terms. They didn't because a lot of people in America realize that there are costs for life under Trump that outweigh any supposed financial benefit of his alleged handling of the economy. A loss of respect and accountability, a loss of shared purpose.
Every man for himself is never been a viable path for a nation's success. Get what's yours and keep it away from others is not what makes America great.
Sadly, Trump's myopia for the economy has poisoned the well for a lot of people. Brought to action by Trump's rhetoric and political self serving, there have been protests against stay at home orders. (Conveniently only in states with Democratic governors.) Trump's lack of intelligence, wisdom or simple human empathy has brought out the worst in some people. They're chafing at the constrictions on their lives because they see this disease in partisan terms. They're not getting anything out of it.
But thankfully, not everyone has this view.
Yes, we can be annoyed about being constricted by stay at home orders. It's a perfectly human response. But we're doing this because we can see beyond ourselves. We understand that staying at home limits the spread of the disease and mitigates the burdens on our over worked, over stressed health care system.
If anything good has come out of this pandemic, it has brought a crystal clear focus to what is good about America. A willingness to sacrifice for the common good, a readiness to help others. Despite Donnie Trump's repeated efforts to declare war on America with his lies and his threats, we've seen so many examples of this nation trying to be better than that.
I like to end my posts with "remember to be good to one another". In this time of trial, there are a lot of people taking that to heart.
Stay safe and as Batman would kindly remind you...
Thanks!
No comments:
Post a Comment