Poli-ticks

The values of America are slipping away

By Arlene Violet
Posted 7/10/18

Recently, I received a firsthand account of the conditions on the border for immigrants from Gabriela Domenzan, Director of the Latino Policy Institute, at Roger Williams University. She is among the …

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Poli-ticks

The values of America are slipping away

Posted

Recently, I received a firsthand account of the conditions on the border for immigrants from Gabriela Domenzan, Director of the Latino Policy Institute, at Roger Williams University. She is among the top experts on immigration issues in the United States. As bone-rattling as her recitation was following her visit there, I find the president’s ongoing behavior toward immigrants even more chilling.

I don’t expect many of you to agree with this column. Indeed, the popularity of Mr. Trump has risen to over 42 percent as his attacks have escalated. This obvious agreement with his fascist rhetoric by average folk causes me the greatest concern as to what this country is becoming. Slowly but surely the principles for which this country stands are being eroded by the president and his echo chamber.

Fascism begins with the building up of a sense of threat by the despised out-group. The President has done a masterful job of demonizing immigrants. First, he described them as murderers and rapists. He linked the arrival of little children with the onslaught of gang members coming across the border. His believers have swallowed this linkage, hook, line and sinker. The President has used the time-honored tactic of doing a trial run. After describing the separation of babies from their mothers and families as something he wished that he hadn’t had to do, he followed up by stating that these immigrants “infest” the US. What is truly certain is that his stories that he puts out in public, only to pull them back, adjust, and go again are the truly “undocumented” tales.

President Trump is wearing down the American conscious. He is getting people used to accepting what they initially recoiled from. His attacks on anyone who disagrees with him are rooted in the old-fashioned tactic of tribalism, where a despot divides the society into mutually exclusive groups. The “faithful” are fed “alternative facts” impervious to actual reality.

Many folks in this country have had their used-to-be moral boundaries undermined. So-called religious folks who pray on Sundays to "suffer the little children to come unto me" from the New Testament, fail to make the connection on Monday when they see children in cages split up from their families. Instead, they are morally indignant and blame the asylum-seekers for coming here. Apparently, they think they should be prosecuted instead or sent back without a hearing or adjudication by a judge, to the violence they tried to escape. Fox News reinforced the lack of analysis by calling the crying children “actors” and "liars", and as writer Finton O’Toole, recently wrote, “the sounds of anguish are described as typical of the manipulative behavior of these ‘animals’ coming to infest us."

It’s pretty ironic when a President’s wife, who twice came to this country illegally, can ignore the situation. Already far too many Americans don’t care about migrants drowning in the sea, or a brown-skinned toddler scarred by separation. Lady Liberty is no more. Her storyline of “Give me your poor” has been shelved for a new script which asserts American superiority and the need not to be tainted by lesser “creatures”. If the latter script seems familiar, it should be. It is the Nazi storyline.

Arlene Violet is an attorney and former Rhode Island Attorney General.

Arlene Violet

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