I had not fundamentally shared the sense that America has been broken, for the last three years, that others in America have - until today.
We are a nation with a $19.3 trillion dollar GDP and a Federal budget approaching $5 trillion per year. And we ran a "Federal immigration holding facility" for several days under a bridge, behind a giant, temporary barbed wire fence.
You have to be kidding me.
It is, ironically enough, always the stark, ugly bareness of the various facilities we build to hold our cultural scapegoats that always horrify my soul the most. We build ugly, soulless prisons out of stone and cheap plastic - or in this case, out of nothing at all, and yet still generally charged on a cost-plus basis to the U.S. taxpayer.
In some ways these are becoming the defining images of this Presidency to me - migrants and refugees penned behind barbed wire, caged and sick, fed on dregs in a refugee camp like animals.
It's a brutal, sick sight to see.
The Guardian wrote:For three days and nights, Maria and her 14-year-old son were penned behind barbed wire, under a bridge in El Paso. Cold, hungry, surrounded by sick and crying babies and with only the stony ground for a bed, her first experience of America was not as she had imagined.
“I came here to work and get a better future for my family,” she said. “I never thought I would go through this.”
We are a nation with a $19.3 trillion dollar GDP and a Federal budget approaching $5 trillion per year. And we ran a "Federal immigration holding facility" for several days under a bridge, behind a giant, temporary barbed wire fence.
You have to be kidding me.
It is, ironically enough, always the stark, ugly bareness of the various facilities we build to hold our cultural scapegoats that always horrify my soul the most. We build ugly, soulless prisons out of stone and cheap plastic - or in this case, out of nothing at all, and yet still generally charged on a cost-plus basis to the U.S. taxpayer.
In some ways these are becoming the defining images of this Presidency to me - migrants and refugees penned behind barbed wire, caged and sick, fed on dregs in a refugee camp like animals.
It's a brutal, sick sight to see.
“I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong." --Frederick Douglass