Monday, June 18, 2018

Family values hypocrisy?

I had just convinced myself that I should put off that one thread I was trying to pick back up, get back to blogging about books and movies, and not pick up on all of that again until I finish my post-election reading. After all, the subject matter was related. But I think that was wrong.

Many of you may be horrified by the forced separation of families by immigration. That is understandable. It cruelly adds trauma to people who have already been through enough. It runs the risk of permanent separation, as young children (like a breast-feeding four month old baby) may not even know their family names yet, and even with older children who remember their former addresses, it is questionable whether that home is still there and whether their parents would make it back there. When you send a woman back to Guatemala without her child, I question whether they could ever be reunited:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/us/immigration-deported-parents.html

It doesn't even have the questionable benefit of being efficient. It is much easier to have detained parents care for their own children than to hire and train enough people to adequately meet required ratios even without factoring in language differences and the effects of trauma.

https://www.theroot.com/ex-shelter-worker-says-new-staffers-received-just-1-wee-1826918434

In short, there are a lot of horrible things about this, where the horror is a feature not a bug, and it makes the mind recoil. So many of you may be horrified, and if you are a regular reader of this blog you probably are, but there are many people who are fine with it.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/392817-poll-trump-approval-rating-ties-highest-point-of-his-presidency

https://www.thedailybeast.com/poll-republicans-approve-of-trumps-family-separation-policy

I wondered about that. For the candidate who ran on racism and where we have seen racist incidents increasing, it's kind of not surprising, but it still feels like there should be some push back. For the people who voted for Trump because Democrats are okay with killing babies, shouldn't at least some of them be upset about babies being torn for their families and held in empty Wal-marts and tent cities with inadequate supervision that would be enough to cause severe permanent psychological trauma even assuming that no other abuse happens (which given everything is very unlikely)?

Apparently not.

It is easy to be horrified by the people too. Tomorrow I want to spend some time on how they can justify it. Those justifications are way off, which leads us into another problem area, and then we will be getting closer to what I have been trying to say.

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