Thursday, August 30, 2018
trumping The Flag
A thoughtful mind, when it sees a nation’s flag, sees not the flag only, but the nation itself, and whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the government, the principles, the truths, the history which belongs to the nation that sets it forth.
— Henry Ward Beecher, The National Flag
It is not my practice to use this space to offer advice to Donald Trump. Nonetheless, he has so greatly embarrassed this country and himself in the course of less than a week, that it seems like the least I can do is offer some suggestions about things he might like to tweet. Last things first.
It takes only a person with a very small mind to decide to use the American flag as a way to express disrespect for someone of whose national stature the person with the very small mind is deeply envious. That is why following John McCain’s death, the flag found itself being used, not as a patriotic symbol, but as a weapon to give vent to a small man’s envy of another man’s national stature. To effect this result, the flag over the White House was lowered, raised, and lowered, all within a period of less than 24 hours. The death of John McCain was not the only death into which Donald inserted himself in a way befitting his crude style. The other was the death of Mollie Tibbetts.
Molly’s death gave him the excuse to bellow yet again about the need for a wall because an illegal immigrant was the apparent murderer. In his tweets, he was mindless of the feelings of her family. As Sandi Tibbetts Murphy, one of Mollie’s relatives wrote on Facebook: “It is not your right to exacerbate this grievous act by hijacking Mollie and all she believed with your racist fear-mongering. You do not get to use her murder to inaccurately promote your ‘permanently separated’ hyperbole.”
Sandi got it right. Not only is the racist in the White House interjecting himself into a family tragedy, he is, as always, wrong on the facts. Contrary to Donald’s repeated assertions, illegal immigrants do not commit more crimes in the United States than those of us who are not illegal immigrants. A study by the Pew Research Center shows that first generation immigrants are less likely to engage in criminal activity than native-born Americans.
If Donald really wanted to get concerned about crime he might have addressed the arrest of one man whose arrest took place the same week that Mollie’s body was discovered, and the arrest of a second man arrested a few weeks earlier. Both men were, as far as has been reported, citizens of the United States in good standing. Neither of them was an illegal immigrant. Their only offenses were that they were rapists and murderers.
On August 23, 2018, the same day Mollie’s body was discovered, the New York Times published an extensive report on how missing court paperwork permitted a man who had raped and killed a nurse in Springfield Gardens, Queens, to be released without bail when arrested for minor charges. That happened because neither the court nor the attorneys involved in the court proceedings were aware of earlier proceedings in which he was being charged with rape and murder. Two weeks after his release he raped and murdered a young nurse. According to the Times report, Danueal Drayton has told authorities that he is responsible for a number of rapes and murders in New York City for which he has not yet been charged. He was arrested in Los Angeles a few weeks after his release, in an apartment where he was holding captive a young woman who said he had raped her. The story and the oversight was alarming. Donald was silent.
On August 22, 2018, Darold Wayne Bowden was arrested in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Prior to his arrest he was known as the Ramsey Street Rapist. For more than 10 years police had been unable to identify him. Mr. Bowden is now in jail and faces criminal charges involving first-degree rape, first-degree burglary and felony larceny. As is the case with Mr. Dayton, there have been no suggestions that he is an illegal immigrant. Donald is silent.
In defense of Donald, insofar as the flag is concerned, there is an outside chance that he is unaware of the importance of the flag as a symbol. That that may be the case is shown by a widely circulated picture of Donald sitting at a table at Nationwide Childrens’ Hospital in Columbus Ohio on August 24, 2018. Donald is seated next to small children and is drawing the American flag for the children. The picture shows the flag he is drawing for the children. It has one red stripe and one blue stripe, the stripes being separated by white spaces. It is not known how he would have completed it given more time. It is possible, however, that he was drawing Mr. Putin’s flag. That flag, like the flag Donald was drawing, has red, white and blue stripes. The United States flag that flies over the White House has red and white stripes. Perhaps someone will let him know. The children almost certainly already know, but were too polite to share their knowledge with the White House resident fool. Christopher Brauchli can be emailed at brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu. For political commentary see his web page at http://humanraceandothersports.com
Trumping The Flag
A thoughtful mind, when it sees a nation’s flag, sees not the flag only, but the nation itself, and whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the government, the principles, the truths, the history which belongs to the nation that sets it forth.
Henry Ward Beecher, The National Flag
It is not my practice to use this space to offer advice to Donald Trump. Nonetheless, he has so greatly embarrassed this country and himself in the course of less than a week, that it seems like the least I can do is offer some suggestions about things he might like to tweet. Last things first.
It takes only a person with a very small mind to decide to use the American flag as a way to express disrespect for someone of whose national stature the person with the very small mind is deeply envious. That is why following John McCain’s death, the flag found itself being used, not as a patriotic symbol, but as a weapon to give vent to a small man’s envy of another man’s national stature. To effect this result, the flag over the White House was lowered, raised, and lowered, all within a period of less than 24 hours. The death of John McCain was not the only death into which Donald inserted himself in a way befitting his crude style. The other was the death of Mollie Tibbetts.
Molly’s death gave him the excuse to bellow yet again about the need for a wall because an illegal immigrant was the apparent murderer. In his tweets, he was mindless of the feelings of her family. As Sandi Tibbetts Murphy, one of Mollie’s relatives wrote on Facebook: “It is not your right to exacerbate this grievous act by hijacking Mollie and all she believed with your racist fear-mongering. You do not get to use her murder to inaccurately promote your ‘permanently separated’ hyperbole.”
Sandi got it right. Not only is the racist in the White House interjecting himself into a family tragedy, he is, as always, wrong on the facts. Contrary to Donald’s repeated assertions, illegal immigrants do not commit more crimes in the United States than those of us who are not illegal immigrants. A study by the Pew Research Center shows that first generation immigrants are less likely to engage in criminal activity than native-born Americans.
If Donald really wanted to get concerned about crime he might have addressed the arrest of one man whose arrest took place the same week that Mollie’s body was discovered, and the arrest of a second man arrested a few weeks earlier. Both men were, as far as has been reported, citizens of the United States in good standing. Neither of them was an illegal immigrant. Their only offenses were that they were rapists and murderers.
On August 23, 2018, the same day Mollie’s body was discovered, the New York Times published an extensive report on how missing court paperwork permitted a man who had raped and killed a nurse in Springfield Gardens, Queens, to be released without bail when arrested for minor charges. That happened because neither the court nor the attorneys involved in the court proceedings were aware of earlier proceedings in which he was being charged with rape and murder. Two weeks after his release he raped and murdered a young nurse. According to the Times report, Danueal Drayton has told authorities that he is responsible for a number of rapes and murders in New York City for which he has not yet been charged. He was arrested in Los Angeles a few weeks after his release, in an apartment where he was holding captive a young woman who said he had raped her. The story and the oversight was alarming. Donald was silent.
On August 22, 2018, Darold Wayne Bowden was arrested in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Prior to his arrest he was known as the Ramsey Street Rapist. For more than 10 years police had been unable to identify him. Mr. Bowden is now in jail and faces criminal charges involving first-degree rape, first-degree burglary and felony larceny. As is the case with Mr. Dayton, there have been no suggestions that he is an illegal immigrant. Donald is silent.
In defense of Donald, insofar as the flag is concerned, there is an outside chance that he is unaware of the importance of the flag as a symbol. That that may be the case is shown by a widely circulated picture of Donald sitting at a table at Nationwide Childrens’ Hospital in Columbus Ohio on August 24, 2018. Donald is seated next to small children and is drawing the American flag for the children. The picture shows the flag he is drawing for the children. It has one red stripe and one blue stripe, the stripes being separated by white spaces. It is not known how he would have completed it given more time. It is possible, however, that he was drawing Mr. Putin’s flag. That flag, like the flag Donald was drawing, has red, white and blue stripes. The United States flag that flies over the White House has red and white stripes. Perhaps someone will let him know. The children almost certainly already know, but were too polite to share their knowledge with the White House resident fool.
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
Suffer Little Children . . . .
When the voices of children are heard on the green,
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And everything else is still.
— William Blake,Nurse’s Song
It is a sad time to be a child. Who’d have thought it just a few years ago. Consider Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, and the United States, to name just a few of the places where sadness for children prevails.
The war began in Syria five years ago. More than 6.1 million Syrians have fled their homes. Imagine what it is like to be a child, homeless in the country you call home, hearing the bombs destroying the neighborhoods in which you formerly played, destroying the house you just fled, the house in which you left behind your beloved toys and stuffed animals. You are one of the 2.5 million children who have been displaced since the beginning of the Syrian war. You are sad because you knew someone who was among the 500,000 Syrians who have been killed since the war began. Fourteen percent of the people killed in the last five years of war have been children like you. Perhaps you can find solace in the fact that you are part of the largest displaced population in the entire world. Children are apt to think that being part of something big is something to be proud of. It’s not. And if you are looking for sadness you can go to Yemen.
In Yemen you are living in a country that has the largest food security emergency in the entire world. According to United Nations officials, in 2017 there were 18 million people in Yemen in need of assistance out of a population of 28 million. That number includes hundreds of thousands of children. It is a sad time to be a child when you reflect on what happened on August 9, 2018. That was the day that a school bus carrying students on a school outing was destroyed by a bomb manufactured in the United States by Lockheed Martin, sold to Saudi Arabia by the United States government, and delivered to the school bus on a Saudi led coalition warplane. The coalition includes the United States. Forty boys ranging in age from six to 11 were killed. Eleven adults were killed. Seventy-nine people were wounded, 56 of them children. It was a very sad day to be a child in Yemen.
It is a sad time to be a child if you were born in South Sudan. According to the United Nations refugee agency, 17,600 South Sudanese children have fled that country since the outbreak of Sudan’s civil war in 2013, leaving their parents behind. For a few of the children, their sadness has been ameliorated. According to the United Nations agency, 433 unaccompanied minors who fled to Uganda without their parents have been reunited with them. That leaves the United Nations refugee agency with only 99,342 open cases of attempts to reunite families, families comprising in part sad children.
It is a sad time to be a child if you are a child in the United States whose parents hoped to find asylum in the United States of America, to get away from dangerous conditions in the country from which they’d fled. Just like the 17,600 children who left South Sudan without their parents, you were separated from your parents when you entered the United States. It is sad to be a child who upon arriving in the United States is not separated from parents but is held in squalid conditions that would not be tolerated if you were anyone other than the child of someone seeking asylum. It was sad that when your mother told one of the immigration officials that your one-year old sibling needed solid food, she was told that she was not living in a seven-star hotel and was asked whether she would rather have a skinny child or a dead child. It is sad to be a child when, according to a United States Senator who visited an immigration center where people seeking asylum are being held, reports that: “There are children by themselves. . . . little girls who are 12 years old are taken away from the rest of their families and held separately. Or little boys. They’re all lying on concrete floors in cages. There’s just no other way to describe it.” It is sad to be a child in a country where, in response to a court order that families whom the government had separated be reunited, and at the end of July, 700 families had still not been reunited and the government has had difficulty accounting for their whereabouts.
It is sad to be a child in Syria. It is sad to be a child in Yemen. It is sad to be a child in South Sudan. It can be sad to be a child in the United States. It is sad that because of adults, there are so many places for children to be sad.
Tuesday, August 14, 2018
Trumping Immigrants
All of our people, all over the country-except the pure-blooded Indians-are immigrants . . . .
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Speech November 4, 1944
A number of readers have written asking whether the recent privately held citizenship ceremony for Viktor and Amalija Knavs had anything to do with the new regulation being proposed by the Trump administration to make it easier to reduce the population of the United States. The question is timely, because news of the proposed regulation leaked out two days before Viktor and Amalija proudly became citizens.
Viktor and Amalija were sworn in as United States citizens on August 9, 2018, in a private ceremony that took place in Manhattan. Both their daughter and son-in-law were busy and unable to attend, but it was nonetheless a happy day. Their son-in-law is Donald J. Trump, and their daughter is his wife, Melania, of whom they are terribly proud since they had not dreamed she would attain such stature when she first left home as a teen ager.
Viktor and Amalija became United States citizens thanks to a program that Donald wants to end. That program is known as “chain migration.” The program permits American citizens to obtain residency for certain relatives who are non-citizens. The relatives who can gain entry under that program are the spouse, minor child, parent, of a U.S. citizen, and certain other individuals described by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Donald’s wife, Melania, has been a United States citizen since 2006. She sponsored her parents’ residency some years ago and they have been United States residents since the early 2000s. On August 9, 2018, the private ceremony took place in Manhattan making them United States citizens.
The first question thoughtful readers have asked is whether Viktor and Amalija decided to obtain their citizenship last week because their son-in-law had tweeted: “Some people come in, and they bring their whole family with them, who can be truly evil. NOT ACCEPTABLE.” Readers asked if it was possible that the Knavses thought Donald was referring to them since reports say that they live in Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago and the White House. Some readers wondered if Donald may just have tired of having them around all the time and longed for the happy times he and Melania had together before her parents became permanent fixtures. That tweet was sent out in 2017, however, long before the swearing in ceremony, so it is unlikely that tweet was the motivating factor in their decision to become citizens last week.
Other readers asked whether it had anything to do with a proposed regulation, news of which had leaked out two days before Amalija and Viktor became citizens. The proposed regulation applies to all legal immigrants who have obtained benefits from assorted safety net programs such as the Children’s Health Insurance Program known as “CHIP,” food stamps, public housing, or health insurance purchased on an Obamacare exchange. Under the proposed regulations, immigrants who have received those benefits or whose children have received those benefits, even if the children are United States citizens, are subject to deportation even though they are legal residents. The question is did the Knavses want to get their citizenship before the new rules became effective. Here is what may have made them nervous.
The Knavses live in the White House some of the time and feared that might be considered public housing, thus subjecting them to deportation. The same is true of their meals when in the White House. An argument might be made that the meals they eat there, for which they almost certainly do not pay, are the equivalent of food stamps and, therefore, would qualify them for instant deportation under the proposed regulation.
The third reason the Knavses might have wanted to quickly become citizens is because, under the proposed rule, it is not only the benefits they receive under the proscribed programs that jeopardizes their ability to stay in the country, but benefits received by any of their children, even if those children are United States citizens. Thus, if Melania receives any of the proscribed benefits, the Knavses could be subject to deportation since the rule applies to the children of non-citizen parents living in this country. Melania is certainly not getting any benefits under CHIP or Medicaid. Although it might be said that Melania is receiving a proscribed governmental benefit because she lives in government provided housing, the house in which she lives almost certainly does not qualify as public housing. Similarly, even though many of her meals are paid for by the government, those meals cannot be considered purchased with food stamps and hence that part of the proposed regulation does not apply to her.
All of the foregoing notwithstanding, the Knavses may have been told by a super-cautious lawyer that they should get their citizenship while the getting was good, lest some someone come up with a creative analysis of the proposed rule and conclude that it does apply to them. The good news, as far as the Knavses are concerned, that they are now safe. The bad news is none of the less fortunate people who are now here legally but to whom the proposed regulations do apply, are not. As the tweet says: NOT ACCEPTABLE. Would that that were true.