incorrect but oft-repeated

     On SLATE, there's an article titled

"After ICE"

sub-head:  On Aug. 7, immigration agents arrested 680 factory workers in Mississippi.  Here's what happened next.


Written by Henry Grabar
Aug 18, 2019      7:00 PM

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     Perusing the Reader Comments was interesting.

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COMMENTS


^ It's a distraction and nothing more.


^ If every immigrant, illegal or otherwise, were a white European we wouldn't even be having this debate.


^ Eh, we need someone to hate.  Without browns and blacks, we would be back to hating Italians and Irish people.  Without them, we would turn our attention to left handed people.


^ Yes.  If we solved the immigration issue, Republicans would have one less issue to whip their racist base into a frenzy with.

     It's getting harder and harder to keep the white masses voting for tax cuts for billionaires while you take away their health care!

     Stirring up hate and fear are really the only tools Republicans have.

^ The GOP platform today is basically that

no amount of spending to hurt people is too much,

but

any amount of spending to help people is too much.


^ Sadly true.  They won't even help the veterans they claim to love so much...


^ Republicans have forgotten what it means to be a republican since they are all intent on recreating the landed gentry from whence they fled.

^ ...there are (incorrect, but oft-repeated) arguments against immigration on both sides.


^ The solution surely isn't to rely on illegal labor then intermittently crack down on individuals.  That is a "solution" that is designed to not solve anything.


^ I wasn't alive in the '30s, and I didn't live in Germany, but the growing stench of fear closely resembles that described by surviving Jews, "Gypsies" and many other Undesirables of that time.

^ On the other hand, they might move on to another "villain" any time.  Who wrings their hands about the gays anymore?


^ Fundamentally, we are not going to "be tough" enough to end undocumented migration.

So far every attempt to do so has backfired.

And it would require something as draconian as China and North Korea to do so.

This is theater for the MAGA crowd to feel like someone is doing something for them against "those people."

(end, SLATE Reader Comments)
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     I was contemplating these Comments because some of them were expressing things I was noticing, too.

     For example, it sometimes appears that some people vote (and cheer at rallies) based on their idea/perception that a candidate is going to "get" somebody, on their behalf.  Not -- do something positive for their own life, but do something to harm or bash someone else.

     I find that puzzling and weird.  But that's how it appears.


     (Is is possible that WWE is having a negative influence on people's thought processes and emotional and intellectual health?)

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This is a poem written by Miller Williams, titled

"Of History and Hope"


We have memorized America,
how it was born and who we have been and where.
In ceremonies and silence we say the words,
telling the stories, singing the old songs.
We like the places they take us.  Mostly we do.
The great and all the anonymous dead are there.
We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.
The rich taste of it is on our tongues.
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go.

But how do we fashion the future?  Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
The children.  The children.  And how does our garden grow?
With waving hands -- oh, rarely in a row --
and flowering faces.  And brambles, that we can no longer allow.


Who were many people coming together 
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos  make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child
cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said,
and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become --
just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.

All this in the hands of children, eyes already set
on a land we never can visit -- it isn't there yet --
but looking through their eyes, we can see
what our long gift to them may come to be.
If we can truly remember, they will not forget.

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