Any constituency that supports an administration which separates children from their parents – in effect damages families – is an evil constituency. 

Families are forever.
My own Mormon culture taught me that long ago. It’s a beautiful concept that applies to everybody everywhere regardless of who they are or where they come from.

Are we going to let partisan political pretend-patriotism speed us further on our way to global villainy?

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men … We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. – Edward R. Murrow

It becomes impossible to remain silent.

There comes a time when those observers before whom the President performs – as if they were the actual majority of the electorate in this country – need to be called to account. They, not liberals and progressives, are those who have sway over what is falsely inflicted on the innocent in the name of American values. They and their constituencies seem to believe that Americans should approve of cruelty in the name of law.

We are NOT citizens of a nation founded by Konservative Intellectuals whose  generational grandchildren prance and posture on our national stage nowadays.

To  wit …

They were on wrong side of the American Revolution.

Approximately one third of the colonial population supported the English King George the Third. These Konservatives wanted no disruption. Afraid or trying to hang on to what they felt England had granted them, they did not want national independence. These Kindergarten Konservatives were not our original patriots.

Original American Konservatives supported protection of slavery in our Constitutional Convention. They wanted to count slaves in determining which states would be “slave states” but did not desire that they be citizens with voting rights.  These Kindergarten Konservatives in no way acted as Founding Fathers, rather as enforcers of their own power and influence at the expense of all others.

Our original Konservatives opposed tariffs to protect American manufacturing. In their Kindergarten-ness they were not able to understand any need to develop our own industrial base. They wanted no changes to a system based on cheap slave labor. They were not industrialists, but cash croppers – planters whose profits required no economic equality.

Our historical Kindergarten Konservatives supported “nullification”, which said that states didn’t have to enforce federal laws they didn’t like.

Our original Kindergarten Konservatives supported repeal of the Missouri Compromise so as to allow slavery in other states where votes and political clout was more vital than common good.

The ancestors of today’s Kindergarten Konservatives opposed the transcontinental  railroad, primarily because railroads carried people who might want to work on their own land and who wouldn’t want or need slaves in the western territories because it might encourage small farmers who owned no slaves in future non-slave states.

Which is why the Grandpas and Grandmas of today’s Kindergarten Konservatives were against the Homestead Act. They didn’t want more land-owners turning the American West into a collection of non-slave states.

Those old Kindergarten Konservatives opposed freedom of speech for Southern opponents of slavery. Perish the thought that southern adults and children might hear something other than the Konservative gospel.

And so Kindergarten Konservatives full of pretend patriotism and self-promoting civic piety disagreed with our sacred declaration that “all men are created equal.”  Their Kindergarten civic ideology was that “the black man has no rights the white man is bound to respect.” (Dred Scott v. Sandford), quite possibly the most foolish Kindergarten Konservative legal decision in our national history.

…
which led to a  Kindergarten Konservative support of destruction of the union rather than allow any restriction of slavery.

Konservatives were opposed the earliest civil rights legislation to enforce the 14th and 15th amendments. They obstructed, intimidated and harassed newly freed slaves who attempted to exercise their Federal civil rights, including the right to vote … and considered themselves god-fearing, civic-minded moral patriots.

Konservatives were against preserving the union. Back then they wanted secession and they got it.

Konservatives were also aggressively and brutally opposed to industrial workers forming unions. Sound familiar?

The ancestors of today’s Kindergarten Konservatives supported the acquisition of foreign colonies

… armed suppression of Filipino independence.

… opposed anti-trust legislation.

… opposed child labor laws.

… opposed universal free public education.

… opposed literacy for African-American citizens, in particular.

…  supported the legal theory of “separate but equal”, a sham that led to the  establishment of “Jim Crow” in the south.

… opposed state laws guaranteeing minimum wages and restricting working hours for  industrial workers.

… opposed the right to vote for women.

These are the real Moochers among us

These are the Kindergarten worshipers of that false American Exceptionalism that has cause more global and national grief than any noble achievement in the past 60 years.

These are the believers that uncompromising anger is civic wisdom, that blind and unblinking opposition is always better than compromise.

Look where it got them.
Look where it got us.

 

Note: When you look stuff up in the technological age, the sources you find are almost numberless. I have been looking stuff up for years and trying to share what I learn. In the case of this article, my principle inspiration and source is Joe Lyles, who authored, among other things, The Conceptual Guerilla articles a few years ago.