How War Fever About Mexico Endangers Us Here At Home
The Folly of Entertaining a U.S. Military Intervention in Mexico: An Ill-Conceived Political Fantasy with Dire Human Consequences.
Here's What the Hamas Attack Tells Us About U.S. Immigration Policy: Nothing
From Reason.com:
Conflating these issues only serves to make the debate over U.S. immigration policy more toxic and stupid than it already is.
Mexico and the U.S. are not Israel and Palestine.
And, as Saturday's attack makes obviously clear, even the most extreme measures designed to "shut down" a border can be defeated.
Photo by Jeremy Lwanga on Unsplash
Another thought-provoking column by: framersqool
As an initial and all-inclusive disclaimer before going on, I despise, abhor, and distrust everything about America's two major political factions.
Both of them and every word out of their lying mouths.
For longer than I can remember, I have regarded them each as little more than criminal cartels, enabling umpteen thousand versions of whatever local boss system truly runs American life anywhere the flag flies. I acknowledge little distinction between them in terms of the dangers each one poses to liberty and the rule of law.
I specifically rank the OKGOP faction in Oklahoma as one of the most corrupt and self-serving State political establishments. As a lifelong natural conservative myself, they can show me even the slightest inclination toward bringing 'limited government' (or the equally applied, neutrally-enforced rule of law, for that matter) into the governing institutions of Oklahoma, any day now. I might be willing to re-think my views of the hopelessly feudalistic and nakedly unaccountable OKGOP machine as even having anything to do with 'traditional values.'
No more do I believe, for a second, that the other faction's lies about 'diversity, inclusion, equality' or 'climate change' or any of their other fashion-driven brand offerings are anything but a different cover story, for the exact same ambition as the OKGOP's: to line their own pockets, and to protect and augment their own feudal fiefdoms, in whatever form these might assume.
Now, all that has been said, I am an American, and I love my country, flawed as it is and horrific as the human costs have been to make it the nation it is today.
So, if there is any need for a local audience of fellow Oklahomans to discuss anything in a context of 'traditional values,' I've always been a big fan of the biggest traditional value of them all: love thy neighbor as thyself.
Here in the Panhandle/High-Plains region, it probably would not be far from accurate to say that half of my neighbors are, and regard themselves as, Hispanic.
Some were born in Mexico and other nations of Latin America, and some come from families whose members had been born as American citizens for generations. Some speak primarily Spanish, others English, and many (especially children and among them, even a great many very young girls) are functionally fluent in both.
Some (more than a few) families are made up of Hispanic people, and those descended from other ethnic heritages.
Some may or may not have family or other ties outside the US, which, for not knowing any better, some non-Hispanic Americans here might presume are dangerous, with various criminal organizations, political movements, or both.
A great many more (I am willing both to assume and to take them at their word because I've discussed this, in both languages, with Hispanics all my life) may want as little to do with anything resembling criminal or terrorist activity as possible, whether they are American citizens or not. Many immigrated here in the first place to leave such evils behind.
So when the larger national body of the GOP criminal cartel that runs Oklahoma manages to put up yet another clown parade of presidential hopefuls, each tripping over the others (and their own forked tongues) to escalate and inflame an entirely unnecessary and extremely dangerous rhetorical posture of attacking or invading our southern neighbor—because Fentanyl (or whatever meme baits the clicks), all I see is just another example of the mass insanity stoked and provoked by 'social media.
....the way that particular (even more) dangerous addiction works, since it is largely an addiction to attention, and a short-term illusion of timely relevance according to numbers of likes and shares, is that more extreme rhetoric gets more attention and baits more clicks, and that the path once taken toward extreme (if entirely insincere or thoroughly uninvested) positions, is a one-way street. Meaning that extreme rhetoric only begets even more extreme rhetoric. And very rarely is there any way back.
I have yet to meet even one non-Hispanic American citizen in my travels, not one, who was denied employment because some employer preferred to hire non-American-citizen Hispanics. But what I hear, again and again, is, 'Those people come here and take our jobs.'
(If anyone among my non-Hispanic acquaintances wants to go and butcher hogs at Seaboard or clean motel rooms for sub-minimum wages on non-benefits-enabling part-time hours, there's a pretty good chance they'd get the job. Though the probable result is that their work ethic, language skills, and productive capacities would be insufficient for the tasks at hand....)
Nor is the above meant to imply that my Hispanic neighbors can manage no higher forms of paying work than these examples. I've known local Hispanics who are registered nurses, owner-operator truck drivers, restaurateur-entrepreneurs, auto mechanics, and public employees, to name a few.
But of this latter group, strangely enough, and distinctly unlike all across the Southwest where I've lived, worked, and traveled over most of my sixty-three years, there seem to be very few Hispanic lawyers, judges, police officers, mayors, sheriffs, school superintendents, legislators, or their chiefs of staff, or any of a long list of more senior positions in the public sector, held by Hispanics.
Not around here: in New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Colorado, namely anywhere in the USA that used to be Mexico and isn't anymore, the presence of high-ranking public officials of Hispanic heritage is entirely commonplace.
But not around here.
Even if no one outside American-Hispanic life (while surrounded day in and day out by Hispanic neighbors) needs to notice this extreme ethnic/cultural imbalance in the region's public sector, I expect that those within it do.
Whether any of them might call this their being under-represented, I'd say it would do any of us well to ask them. I know I do because they are my neighbors. Their interests and priorities are as much deserving of representation as anyone else's. And I also give my Hispanic neighbors enough credit to assume they follow the news.
What such empty slogans as 'Make America Great Again' might mean to any of them...
...again, it'd be better to ask them.
But I at least have a feeling that this slogan, and the foaming-at-the-mouth war fever about attacking Mexico that slogan is coming more and more to embody means anything other than that Hispanic interests and priorities in the USA would become dangerously compromised by any form of armed combat involving American forces south of our border. I'd readily assume that they already have a much more reality-based sense of what 'MAGA' truly means than anyone who thinks they actually believe in it does.
As a student of history, I can see, and name (though I won't in this particular entry), a thousand ways any US military attack on Mexican soil could go wrong, even if only in the operational sense, and probably would.
And I can think of a number, if I could even calculate it, precisely commensurate with the number of Hispanics I have met and known over a lifetime in this country, times many more millions of them, of ways such a misguided adventure almost certainly would bring danger, suffering and injustice upon them personally, right here in the USA, whether any one of them were any party to the issues at stake or not.
And for what?
There is a vast chasm between assuming ignorant things like swarms of terrorists crossing the border at will or evil plots to take away jobs from 'real Americans' or even the latest fashion-crazed claim of some fentanyl overdose crisis and any one of these things actually being true at all, much less imminent threats to national security, along with several other talking points which go in and out of fashion on social media, meant to sustain a sentiment of hostility and suspicion in the USA toward all things Hispanic.
Questioning where such inflammatory and divisive ideas might have come from and the intent behind their distribution, and then comparing them with actual hands-on neighbor-to-neighbor experiences in a solidly Hispanic-influenced and-populated part of the USA, might be a worthwhile exercise just now.
Especially if the traditional values ethos of loving thy neighbor as thyself means anything at all.
Because every one of us has quite a few Hispanic neighbors right here in No Man's Land.
They aren't going to go away. There is no real reason to believe any of them has any less right to be here than anyone else (taking the Indian Removal Act of 1820 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1849 into consideration, it could be well-argued that many of them have just as much right, if not more....),
...and they are, before anything else, our neighbors.
There is, in my view, no remote possibility that any American military adventure in Mexico could solve any problem or cure any hazard for the American people.
It is a human catastrophe in the making, even to indulge in this ridiculous idea as an electorally-motivated political fantasy.
I find it both appalling and terrifying, given where I live and who my neighbors are, and all the centuries of history preceding us that makes our peaceful coexistence nothing short of a miracle, and ample evidence that America.... is great enough already as it is, warts an' all.
And this kind of talk needs to stop. Now.
framersqool
Thoughts from an aging bachelor of no particular consequence who is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.