America's Hostage Crisis

This will not be a pretty blog posting.

This will not be something I can use for a newspaper column.

It won't be something I can submit to a writing contest.

Nevertheless, I will attempt to transcribe my scattered thoughts.

I have been engrossed in using my limited writing time in telling the story of my Ireland trip, using plenty of pictures and entertaining descriptions.

Meanwhile, our American politics continue to descend further down Dante's Inferno.

Insulting our allies and starting a tariff war with them that will create economic losers, and deteriorating our relationships with them in a spectacularly boorish performance at the G-7, approaching toddler-lever tantrums,  He treats democratic leaders like Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada like weak and ineffective scum, and then showers praises on the most brutal dictator of our time, North Korea's Kim Jong Yun, and then ends a summit where North Korea gets what they want and we get vague promises in return.  His campaign manager is jailed pending trial and he acts like he barely ever met the guy.  The New York State Attorney General is prosecuting ghastly crimes of greed and corruption associated with the Trump Foundation.

On and on it goes.

But the internment of children for reasons of deterring future immigration, as a tactic of intimidation, is a new low, one that even many Republicans recognize as particularly foul.   And the President himself explicitly states that it is the Democrat's fault?  Why?  Because they could end it by giving him everything he wants on the immigration issue, including the wall.

That's right.  He's holding children hostage in order to get his god-forsaken, useless wall.

I'm not making this up.  This is pretty much what he is saying.

America's hostage crisis.  And it's of our own making.

The outcry is loud enough that he should cave on this issue,  How many times has every living first lady decided to speak out on an issue, and all have basically the same position on it?  True, Melania Trump's response was a little more clouded than the rest, but think of the miracle it is that she spoke out at all.

Yes, a rational player would cave on this issue.  But we're not dealing with a rational player, are we?  His base has rewarded him for every vile step he's taken in connection with immigration.

SPOILER ALERT:  please disregard what's next if you haven't yet seen Season 2 Episode 9 of The Handmaid's Tale.


In that wonderful but horrifyingly prescient series, June (Offred) found some hidden letters from other handmaidens that revealed how ghastly women were being treated in Gilead (think what a Mike Pence America would be like).  She was burning them when a sympathetic aide to the Commander (the brutal Gilead leader and one who keeps June as, well, basically a sex slave)) rescued and saved the remaining letters.  In Episode 9, he managed to get those letters to June's husband, who had been able to get to Canada.  The husband was able to get the letters posted to the internet, and they were so horrendous, that attitudes changed about Gilead overnight, as they realized that the dictatorial was even worse than they imagined.

And that's where we are with this crisis.  Pictures and audio are starting to come out of the children's concentration camps (does my using that term give some of you the vapors because it sounds too extreme?  too bad so sad - the warning cry of where we're headed must be given now and not when it's too late), and they are starting to wake up a larger swath of the American public.

Maybe we'll get out of this.  Maybe Trump will be forced to cave.  Maybe we've finally hit a turning point in this most grotesque of Presidencies.

Because if we don't, then we have truly lost the America that many of us know and love.

We will truly become one of the world's greatest villains, no longer the beacon of light, hope, and freedom that we should be.

And I'm not ready to see that happen.

Are you?