ICE

Pictures of America


POST 1174

I’ll bet you remember those puzzles that asked you to identify what is missing from a picture. It might be a tree with a trunk that doesn’t touch the ground or a dog that’s missing a leg.  Here’s a visual example from the Way-Back machine.

What’s Missing From This Picture?

As you can see, there are an elderly lady and a pregnant lady standing in the aisle of this bus, while three young men sit in comfort, absorbed in their own worlds, oblivious to the needs of those less able. What is missing is chivalry. If you prefer less archaic terminology, what’s missing is just plain consideration for another person.

We suffer terribly from self-absorption and from a lack of empathy.* Those are drivers for cutting off Social Security and veterans’ healthcare. That’s how we are mindlessly able to turn off the supply of food and medical assistance intended for children living in desperate poverty.

Some who applaud the withholding of benefits from those in need often claim that providing assistance teaches people to be dependent. They seem to think that eliminating assistance will drive people to suddenly become independent, self-sufficient, tax paying Americans. They apparently have forgotten that some simply are not able to be independent. For those of us more fortunate, we worked and kicked into the piggy banks of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and are due their benefits. That’s the deal we all signed up for.

To be fair, food and healthcare going to non-Americans, like to starving, sick people in Africa, is different. It requires more from us. To support such programs requires that we have empathy for others, that we give more than a tiny damn for suffering fellow humans. But empathy seems to be not just in short supply, but is completely absent from those who now pull the levers of our government and in those who, with open eyes, voted for them.

So, the more encompassing answer to the “What’s Missing From This Picture?” question above is empathy. Sadly, even tragically, We The People have allowed enough of us to have been made into replicas of those three seated, self-absorbed bozos on the bus, willfully ignoring any consciousness about the weak legs of an old woman or the compromised balance and endurance of a pregnant woman.

So, for our empathy-less ones, I offer that the assistance we give to others is returned to us in the forms of good citizenship and diplomatic victories abroad. Those benefits should be easy to understand, because they’re self-serving and don’t require any empathy from us.

The picture of America doesn’t have to look like that.

Also from the Way-Back machine, we were shown pictures that had a collection of images and we were challenged to identify which image did not belong with the others. It might be a bowl of fruit that included a screwdriver or a kid in the batters box holding a broom. Here’s an example.

What Doesn’t Belong In This Picture?

We have a lot of things going on in America now that just don’t belong in the same picture as our Constitution or our sometimes squishy rules about justice. Manipulating citizen adults out of voting rights comes to mind.

In Florida in 2018 voters passed a referendum to make it possible for former offenders to vote once they had “paid their debt to society.” Then the extremists in control in Tallahassee twisted things to effectively negate the new citizen-decided rule. That’s much like gerrymandering and positioning polling places such that White voters only wait 20 minutes to vote, while Black people have to wait 8 hours. That doesn’t belong on our picture of America.

The Onion, of course.

Neither does grabbing people off the street and sending them to rendition sites without first accusing them of some wrongdoing and then giving them their day in court to contest the charges. It’s called “due process of law” and it’s owed to all “persons” (not just citizens). Denying due process of law is a violation of the 5th and 14th Amendments. We are violating them every day. That doesn’t belong on our picture of America, either.

The blanket firing of government workers, people who ensure that our food is safe, people who protect our nuclear stockpiles, people who monitor our rules and regulations to stop cheaters and more is a violation of our stated values, who we say we are, too.

The picture of America doesn’t have to look like that.

We might need those in charge to be brought to a 3rd grade classroom for a semester to show them what they were supposed to learn from those pictures they were shown long ago. What we do need for sure is for We The People to keep showing up demanding only what belongs in our picture of America and rejecting the rest.

It’s being claimed by some with very loud voices that this country is solely for Christian (although not necessarily doing what Jesus would do), straight, White men who like to tell you how to live. Were he alive now, Robert E. Lee might be one of them.

He was a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Then he violated his oath, his sacred honor, to lead troops for the Confederacy against our country. Doesn’t that make him a traitor?

Doesn’t that make you wonder why the name of this traitor is on street signs all over the South and there are statues of him that are viewed with reverence by millions? Don’t you wonder at the celebration of abandoned integrity at all levels, especially at the top?

The picture of America doesn’t have to look like that.

For a frightening, maddening explanation of the hypocrisy and cruelty coming our way aimed squarely at our children,  read Catherine Rampell’s excellent piece, Donald Trump’s war on children. One more time: The picture of America doesn’t have to look like that.

Copyright Robert Reich. The chart of America doesn’t have to look this way.

From Robert Reich:

“Teaching is about getting students to reexamine whatever assumptions they carry into the classroom. It’s about provoking conversations, fostering dissent, and learning from one another even when we disagree on issues.”

Reich has been a teacher for 40 years and knows a bit about seeking to understand. Do you imagine that We The People could accept his challenge to his students to reexamine assumptioms? What if we sucked it up, took a breath and followed this teacher’s direction?

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* “Empathy is the oxygen of democracy.” – Jon Meacham

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JA


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Stomach Turning in 4 Parts and 5 Questions


Reading time – 4:49  .  .  .

1. Immigration Vile

We’re all appalled by the forced, medically unnecessary, inept and deceitful sterilizations of would-be immigrants at the hands of at least one doctor at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”),  Irwin County Detention Center. It is a privately owned (LaSalle Corrections), for-profit immigration jail in rural south Georgia. We don’t yet know if such things are happening in other ICE prisons.

First question: Why do we pay private corporations to run this and many other prisons, where they have incentives to lock up as many people as possible and perhaps perform stomach turning additional revenue enhancing acts?

The hideousness of these forced sterilizations – by some counts as many as 18 known and medically unnecessary, non-consensual surgeries – is now known and the full story isn’t out yet. This is a new chapter in American immigration cruelty. The good news, of course, is that this has never happened before.

Except it has. Many times.

In the 20th century alone (and it didn’t start there) tens of thousands of men and women were forcibly sterilized and it will come as no surprise to you who the targets were. From a report on this travesty (and here’s another report on this):

More than 60,000 people were sterilized in 32 states during the 20th century based on the bogus “science” of eugenics, a term coined by Francis Galton in 1883.

Eugenicists applied emerging theories of biology and genetics to human breeding. White elites with strong biases about who was “fit” and “unfit” embraced eugenics, believing American society would be improved by increased breeding of Anglo Saxons and Nordics, whom they assumed had high IQs. Anyone who did not fit this mold of racial perfection, which included most immigrants, Blacks, Indigenous people, poor whites and people with disabilities, became targets of eugenics programs. [emhasis mine]

But that was way in the past, right? Wrong.

Such practices are documented as occurring as recently as 2010. Over 1,400 forced sterilizations were performed in California prisons in just over 13 years. These were all state-sanctioned, non-consensual sterilizations.

To give you an idea of the cruelty of eugenics, the Nazis copied it, using the laws of Indiana and California as models for their 1930s laws that led to roughly 400,000 forced sterilizations. The Nazis weren’t the kind of people to whom we would want to be compared, and yet in this sense we can be.

Second question: Why do we tolerate this cruelty as part of our stomach turning immigration practices?

 

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2. COVID-19 Deaths

Trump’s cruelty and ineptitude remains exactly what the Oxford study said it was. Worse, he continues to do what is counterproductive to beating this pandemic and he avoids doing what would make things better. Nevertheless, there is more to this story and it’s likely not exactly what you think.

If you want to know why some countries have had relatively good results dealing with COVID-19 and why the U.S. has fared much poorer, read this.

Third question: Why have we tolerated a stomach-turning hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths?

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3. RBG’s Seat

Ruth Bader Ginsberg, progressive, civil rights icon of the Supreme Court has died. Separate from her loss and ours we must contend with Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, promising to hurry Trump’s replacement pick through the Senate. He announced that less than two hours after the news of her death broke. His was truly astonishing disrespect.

This is the same Mitch McConnell who declared from a dark corner of his manipulative, power-grabbing mind that in the last year of his administration President Obama couldn’t refill the seat left empty by Antonin Scalia’s death. It wouldn’t be fair to the voters, McConnell told us. The next president should handle that, he said. Besides, he informed us that no president had ever nominated anyone for a Supreme Court seat in his last year in office.

And he was right. Except for Anthony Kennedy, who was nominated by Ronald Reagan in his final year in office. And William Rehnquist and Louis Powell, who were nominated in the last year of Nixon’s first term – you get the idea. But it was really important to the Grim Reaper to prevent President Obama from having a Supreme Court pick in his last year in office, so McConnell made up precedent and put a knee on the neck of Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland.

Now, though, we’re hearing from the other fork of McConnell’s tongue. Somehow his phony precedent doesn’t matter so much, now that Trump is the one doing the nominating. Now McConnell has promised to ram Trump’s pick through the Senate before the November 3 election.

Fourth question: What does that do to your stomach?

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4. American Wars

From Sheila Markin’s recent post:

Trump has called himself a wartime president. Yes, America is at war. Our country has been beset by 4 huge assaults at once.

First, there’s the pandemic which, because of Trump’s interference and mismanagement, has cratered our economy and devastated the lives of Americans, resulting in lost jobs, lost health care, lost health, lost homes, and food insecurity for millions of Americans.

Second, there’s climate change which has created huge raging fires in the West with smoke that turned into cyclones with their own embedded lightning, more powerful hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and ice caps melting at a rapid rate which will cause sea level rise, imperiling coastal areas.

Third, there is social unrest and mainly peaceful marches to support the Black Lives Matters movement in response to the unfairness documented by cell phone footage proving that people of color are treated horribly and are killed by police in disproportionate numbers.

Fourth, our democracy and cherished “free and fair elections” are being attacked by Russia working in tandem with Trump and Republicans to suppress the vote, discourage Dems from coming to the polls and cast doubt on the reliability of mail-in ballots.

America IS at war and Trump is not on our side.

It’s time for we soldiers to report for duty, leading to the

Fifth question: It appears that we have perfected the art of complacency. It’s time to abandon that dark art in all of these issues before our stomachs go terminal. Are you ready?

From Rosh HaShanah commentary:

“If you want to see God save the innocent, you need to get off the couch and save the innocent. If you want to see God feed the hungry, you need to feed the hungry. If you want to see God stand by while the innocent suffer, all you need to do is stand by and do nothing yourself.” (emphasis original) – by Rabbi Brent Chiam Spodek and Ruth Messinger.

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The Fine Print:

  1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings, so don’t bug me about it.
  2. Sometimes I change my opinions because I’ve learned more about an issue. So, educate me. That’s what the Comments section is for.
  3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
  4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.

JA

 


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

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