Breaking the Close

Breaking the Close

They have arrested a lawyer, supposedly one of the organizers of the protest that took place inside a church in Minneapolis, illustrating why some of us thought that protest was wrongheaded to begin with on more than one level. 

I have a lot of heartburn, maybe that's just my formerly Catholic tapes, but going into a place of worship, whether that's a synagogue, a church, a mosque, ashram, is wrong. Not a bunch of folks would see that differently. Given the facts behind their reasoning for picking that particular church there would be nothing "wrong" with a protest outside that church. They "broke the close". Would Martin Luther King have condoned that?  

It's wrong on a practical level too. Even if our times wasn't being held in the constant grip of emotional fracture by this horrible administration - even were this some other time, a time when these goons haven't somehow managed to convince a very large swath of our population that Christianity (but not Judaism or Islam) is under some sort of an attack - these are bad optics. This incident is now being exploited well beyond the events of that day. It appears that the legitimate pastor handled the whole situation pretty well by engaging with the protesters.

People on my side are trying to rationalize what happened by pointing out the other bad things that have been happening - Taking kids, five-year-olds, off the streets and sending them off somewhere, Going into schools, No knocks, battering people's homes, breaking into cars, the jackboot hooliganism. We are understandably angry and emotionally frazzled. But that is just Whataboutism. Don't act in a way that falls into the game plan of the people who are more concerned with propagating the myth that they are champions and we are the evildoers, not the victims. If this was meant somehow as propagande par le fait (Propaganda by the deed), it comes perilously close to having the adverse effect. 

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BASTA!

BASTA! 

Trump is the poster boy for Marcuse's criticism of modern societal systems as one-dimensional. He gives thin excuses for engagement, takes synaptic leaps in the consideration of weighty and complicated issues - the economy is linked to tariffs...the border and immigration is linked to drug trafficking...is linked to the border and crime, and immigration...is linked to drug trafficking...is linked to Venezuela...Greenland...NATO...etc. - as somehow binary and easily addressed without upsetting stasis. The immigration issue right now is somehow tied to Minnesota supposedly because of fraud and it being a sanctuary city.

To be clear, the blame - for the immigration issue in general and the border problem specifically - can rightfully be placed on the inaction of both sides (as well as other complicating factors such as armed conflicts elsewhere, economic problems, migration flows, COVID, etc.). The solutions are so complicated and problematic that even when folks on my side of the calculus try to deal with it, we have issues. I've lived through two or three of these roundups. I was a very strong critic of Obama's deportation policies, primarily as a tribal thing because I felt like he was being much too cruel. 

For years, those of us that consider ourselves moderate on this issue would argue that it was  well past time to address the immigration issue. Reagan was the last one to truly attempt to do it. We would argue what is essentially a laches concept: that "hey, you're just waking up to the fact that there's 12 million people here?"; that you can't sit on a problem and all of a sudden decide that you're going to fix it without taking some responsibility for the fact that you've been a willing consumer; and that throughout you have delayed dealing with the problem. You are complicit and have actually worked against solving the problem without any legitimate explanation for the delay. 

It's unjust. That, that is the rub. It's just not fair that after 10, 20, 30 years, you're all of a sudden going to decide in this brutality. While you are "putting on your big boy pants" you engage not just in a shock treatment against people - them and us - but also to the economy as well as to the whole concept of this country's rightful sense of justice and dignity.

Whether Obama's approach was right or wrong, some folks now use him as a justification for what is happening now in our major cities. They are woefully missing the point. And it's well past style points. Trump is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It takes a certain type of arrogance, brazenness, imperviousness to this cruelty and to what these politicians are doing to the concept of truth. That's why you get to the point where the folks that for years haven't wanted to deal with the veteran's homelessness, runaway corporations, health care or any of the other social problems get to talk about solutions that are not helpful. The most brazen example of the arrogance of power - what was feckless power politik - was when Trump told the GOP to scuttle the solution that Biden and other GOP senators had arrived at but now uses it to justify this jackboot behavior.

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