ICE admits that up to 50% of arrests in its Chicago raids are "collateral.” These aren't statistics. They are parents taken from their children, neighbors taken from our communities. When does a "collateral" U.S. citizen child's trauma matter? This isn't law enforcement; it's a campaign of terror.
Sunday, October 05, 2025
“Kavanaugh Stops”
Andrew Weinstein:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Collateral- poor, minorities, homeless, addicts, immigrants documented and undocumented, refugees, people who don't matter and haven't mattered in the US. Their rights are merely contingent. The dominant culture is free to infringe those rights, those whose rights are violated can of course sue, but that takes substantial money and time, which they don't have. So no meaningful rights at all.
ReplyDeleteLaws work because most of us act in good faith and follow them. The Republicans figured out you can act in bad faith, violate them, and mostly it won't matter. This particularly true when you control the means of enforcement. We can't go back to what was before, that has proven to be brittle and has failed. I don't know what comes next, and how anything can meaningfully work when one side has decided to reject basic principles such as the rule of law and democracy, and refuses to act in good faith. It doesn't mean we shouldn't make reforms, and I live in hope that a majority will ultimately support basic principles, but I think we are at least a generation now from any reasonable political stability.
The grand project some have been working on since Goldwater failed (I know, I’m a broken record) has come to fruition. And what strange fruit it bears. Not for the first time in our history.
ReplyDeleteMore recently, and part of the same effort begun in ‘64, Gingrich chewed up the rule book and McConnell spit it out. Gingrich is happy to keep throwing bombs from the sidelines (gets him attention, which he craves like Trump does). McConnell sounds like he’s beginning to regret what he aided (always be careful what you ask for); but too late now.
Is it worse than it’s ever been? I’m a straight, white male. I can’t help but feel like I’m privileged to even think that. More and more I think my mistake, as a child of the ‘60’s who grew up on that idealism, was in believing American culture would actually improve. I’m not damning, but, shit, we lie to ourselves vigorously in order to ignore the broken backs and piles of bones we rest so comfortably atop, convinced we earned it all by our own efforts and our righteousness.
We’re still an adolescent country, incapable of looking honestly at who we are and how we got here. I don’t foresee when we’ll ever be able to, or what it will take to make us see.