Skip to main content

Heartening Resistance

Our children had service expectations when they were in school as kids. Both of them volunteered at a local food charity providing food aid to any local children that asked for it. My wife and I have paid attention to the charity, deemed them one of the best uses of our charity budget, and have supported them for many years. We love children. We don't think children in our country or specifically in our school district should go hungry. We don't use a filter on who we want to keep from going hungry, because we were raised in faith traditions that teach that our god loves everyone and does not discriminate in that love.

Our nation's majority of voters have installed a leadership that does discriminate in ways loud and proud. There are many details to their cruelty. One small detail is their opposition to showing love to small children unless they have citizenship documents or at least look like they do according to some color scale similar to choosing a household paint.

The leader of the aforementioned food charity recently emailed supporters affirming that they would feed all children who ask and would not cooperate with agencies specializing in sending gun-toting thugs after children to deport them. 

As loud as Trump and company are, folk are resisting. From what I have read this story is being played out across the country, because not everyone in our country hates enough to just go along.

I've posted this one point before; the situation is incredibly fluid. Every time someone takes the path of least resistance with respect to a bigoted and vengeful tyrant and his minions others lose heart and capitulate. Every time someone says no, this is not right, others find strength to do likewise. Try to be in the latter group.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...

Standing Your Corner

I'm a long-term David Simon fan ever since I read his book "Homicide", detailing a year-long embedding with Baltimore homicide detectives. It was clear-eyed about all of the strengths and weaknesses, good reflexes and prejudices of everyone that he met.  I enjoyed the television show that followed that he wrote for, and then of course "The Wire" on HBO and a number of his other shows---only limited by my access to streaming services.  There was a histrionic moment in a later season of "Homicide" where he just let a character vent; a homicide detective who was part-owner of a bar frequented by cops watched a particularly violent drug criminal, responsible for many unsolved homicides, come into his bar with his associates, violating the detective's territory. The detective came around the bar holding a billy club in his hand and loudly discussed his first year as a patrol officer walking a beat. His supervising officer told him that he had a corner a...

Momentum

In my youth my primary social justice commitment was through Amnesty International. As an affluent white male I enjoyed freedoms that I thought ideally everyone should share; in the 1980's we had had the vine of United States support for repressive regimes that were nominally anti-Communist bearing cruel fruit and I in my small part of the world wanted to do something about that.  It was a more active support Amnesty International sought back then; nowadays they just ask me for money. We members were encouraged to write to foreign government officials to urge them to take care of political prisoners that we named, the idea being that as long as they knew that they were seen the cruelty would diminish. One letter per prisoner, because they were all human beings, not just a faceless group. I have no independent way of verifying if the hundreds of letters I wrote eased any suffering; I know that they changed me. Selfishly I am grateful. At the time I made a point of reading journalism...