United States faces a 'good vs. evil' choice
There is something being lost in the created crisis on our southern border that bears pointing out. There have been relationships going back over a hundred years with farm and ranch workers from various areas in the South — down to certain villages and even family dynasties of sheepherders from Peru, Chile and Ecuador.
Unlike cattle, if you want to raise sheep they need human company. There are/were multi-generational family arrangements working lambing season and summer pasture here and then returning to the Southern Hemisphere to do the same thing although with different animals. Now we have very few families coming up and our sheep are raised on factory production lines. We used to have the same pickers from the same little towns come up every year to help with harvest fruit all over the west and our economies flourished and the working class never had it so good. Then a small crowd of wealthy, loud, evil, racist people who freaked out when they realized America was soon to become more brown than white got to work infecting the GOP. It wasn’t bad enough all the little half-breeds were becoming more and more common, brown people were just coming over our borders unmolested and speeding up the process!
A separate cult that believed we are in the END TIMES and Trump is the Anti-Christ combined forces and here we are. Thus America began the small step-by-small step journey that led us to the construction of the fascist concentration camps for kids. Even in the Japanese internment camps, they didn’t rip babies from the arms of their mothers. Yet in this case, there are multiple family members who have been deported to their home country and our government is unable to locate their children, a situation only going to get worse and more common. We cannot allow this to be acceptable under ANY lame sort of justification. This is Nazi stuff and the repeated use of identical language makes it undeniable.
We have a choice in front of us, a vital, good-vs.-evil choice: Is America to have a fascist future or are we going to retain a representative democracy, where we do not have rulers, we have representatives acting on behalf of citizens, as our Founders intended. One of our political parties has forfeited any legitimate moral authority and has become a hero-worship cult and has completely abandoned its role as a check on executive abuses. Our election was attacked by Russia and the Republicans have rejected the calls of numerous national security agencies to do something/anything to fight the same in the upcoming election.
The alleged president uses every available opportunity to drive a wedge deeper into the divisions in America and elsewhere in ways that delight Putin and Russian state TV. They openly boast that Crimea is theirs and so is Donald Trump. The Republican Party has not just been complicit in this latest racist-inspired outrage; they have laid the foundation of it for years. St. Reagan and the pope are both in the same mind when it comes to how we treat our neighbors but more importantly how we treat strangers. I should be writing this in all caps to express the urgency and seriousness of the threat we face RIGHT NOW in America. If we stand by and watch this we are on the way to being marched into the next camp built JUST for us. Fascism is when corporations and government combine to form autocratic rule. Sounds too darn familiar to me.
Bob Petersen, an Evergreen Democrat, is a candidate in House District 9.