The following is a collection of comments from an online conversation I read this morning. There are some minor edits and organizational changes. Regarding the colorful description of the current administration (ending the first paragraph) I must point out that the previous administrations have been little, if any, better.
The first step Hitler took was deportation of Jews. And now we are arresting Mexicans, Haitians, and Salvadorans and holding them in "temporary" deportation centers where there is no official check on arrivals and departures. Do some go in and never come out? Where are deportees taken? What oversight monitors the process? How can we, the citizens who are ultimately responsible for our government, as the German people were for the actions of the Nazis, confirm that it is genuinely an honest and aboveboard deportation process and not becoming the cheaper and more expedient process of mere elimination? And can we seriously expect a misogynistic, racist, bigoted administration to undertake such an essentially inhumane project with due respect for human rights? Seriously?
There is a place for democratic "consensus." For that citizens require time, commitment to citizenship (a belief in its value), appreciation for discussion and debate and knowledge. In the absence of something that resembles "consensus" (which might only be the fullest possible public disclosure of disagreement), decisions are made that seem mysterious, that one can't account for. Immigration policy, and every nation must have one, whether permissive or the opposite, seems to have fallen from the skies rather than rendered more transparent via public input or, better, construction. Witnessing, at the very least, would be nice. The immigration policy decisions were made outside of any possible public legitimating process. I am speaking now of that last 50 years. One feels differently about a policy that in some regard is "my own," even if that means not fashioned without my conscious dissent, as against one that seems to "come from elsewhere." In fact, it is so "elsewhere" that I doubt there are many Americans who could say what immigration policy includes, say something of its existence in law.
There is an instinctive response to human excrement, defecation and putrefaction. We turn away. We hide it. We cover it. Our daily discourse avoids mention of it. In situations like this, something that people instinctively know is kaka, is the foul odor of pure moral wrong, to treat in the same way. It involves exactly the same mental faculties, I think. And so on every hand, in every context, this foul smelling underbelly of the process remains unobserved.
A public sphere of democratic discourse must demand that grotesque sausage-making be more public. The adult changes the child's diapers despite the crap. That is, if the adult has any love for the child.
