The Shame Of Our Time

Those Trump regime figures who first stole children from refugees and now have them in for-profit prisons where they are violating court orders as to the education and care are a good model of how indifference is the close ally of bigotry.  The Trump regime and the sadists who seem to have been waiting for the opportunity to exercise their depravity under Republican-fascism seem to be going out of their way to outdo each other in vileness. 

There are the deaths of detainees, children, young children among them by negligence and, I wouldn't be surprised to find, willful abuse.

There is the sadistic separation of families without any thought of bringing them together.

There is what seems to be a choice to try to reproduce something like the reported overcrowding on slave ships in over-stuffed, standing room only detainment for days in rooms meant to hold, I've read, a fifth of the number of people held in them.  Holding children in vans for days at a time. 

 

As I mentioned above, there is the news that the Trump regime are, in violation of court orders, ending education and exercise to children it is holding in rent-a-prisons run by for-profit corporations. 

The list of particulars is long and the permission that Republicans in the Congress, the Courts, in the country have given these sadists to do this to people proves that we really are no better than those Americans who accepted or tolerated legal slavery before and de facto slavery and apartheid after the Civil war.

As I mentioned the other day rereading the Hebrew Scriptures, especially after studying some of the the eye-opening commentary by Walter Brueggemann and others, mostly Protestant but some Jewish and some Catholic and Orthodox, has made me see that human beings are doing the same things, committing the same wrongs, accepting the same atrocities that they have always been liable to.  I think that was the biggest lie of the Enlightenment-scientistic period, that belief that we were scientifically and rationally self-starting a new era of ever upward and onward.  The kind of idiocy that Stephen Pinker, the budget brand Pangloss of our time, peddles.  

It's discouraging to consider how long this has been allowed to go on if you remain in the mindset that expects quick and easy righting of things, as seems to be the expectation of those demanding a miracle cure of impeachment when there is no chance that that will work due to the Senate AND THE MEDIA being in the hands of those who either like this status quo or who aren't bothered much by it.  It's so tempting to give up as some I know seem to have given up.  The gangsters, the Trump regime, the Republican-fascists, the billionaires foreign and domestic who are funding the resurgence of neo-fascism and neo-Nazism so to destroy democracy and decency are counting on that weary capitulation.  We don't have any right to do that.  I think what we have to do is face the fact that we are facing the perpetual worst parts of human character which are always there unless they are held in check by the belief in specific holdings of absolute morality.  

I think one of the most interesting parts of this is the resurgence of fascism in the Europe we were all being assured was, de-Christianized, safely civilized and rational during the atheist fad of the 00s.  I will admit that I have been kind of surprised at how such places as Holland, Denmark, Norway,  France even Sweden have seen a resurgence of powerful neo-fascist and neo-Nazi movements.  I was not as surprised to see it in those countries damaged by Soviet occupation where the habits that come from being terrorized by a police state were more entrenched so recently.  

In the United States, the most intersting thing is in the exposure of such a large percentage of "evangelicals" right-wing integralist Catholics [including so many of the Bishops and Cardinals appointed by JPII and BXVI] are so quick and eager to set aside the teachings of Jesus, the radical justice of the Hebrew tradition to support a vulgar Mammonist sexual degenerate and crook like Trump.  

It becomes ever more clear to me that atheist or "evangelical" when someone gives up a real and effective belief in the moral teachings of Jesus and the other Prophets, this is the kind of thing you can expect.  And it isn't just libertarian atheists who have done that, though they certainly share in the blame.