Everybody has a breaking point, when they just can’t take it anymore. But what does it take to get you to there?
I know there are many who live on the Central Coast and pick up the Sun who voted for President Donald Trump, who are fond of the president and his policies. If you’ve paid attention to my chirping, you’d know I don’t share those sentiments.
Supporters of the president must know by now what a flagrant liar he is, and if the dishonesty hasn’t reached their breaking point, I have to assume they just don’t care.
They didn’t care when Trump blamed Democrats and President Barack Obama for his own administration’s policy of separating parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border, even though Attorney General Jeff Sessions made it clear that his zero tolerance policy (which began in April) was to set an example to anyone crossing the border without authorization, whether they were seeking asylum or not. The number of children taken from their families at the border is now in the thousands, but the lies continue.
“Democrats can fix their forced family break up at the Border by working with Republicans on new legislation, for a change!” Trump said on Twitter on June 16, all while our own state’s Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) had a legislative fix for his policy ready to go. There still isn’t a single Republican senator who has agreed to support it.
Maybe I shouldn’t be all that surprised.
These are the people who cheer on Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE)—a federal agency younger than this newspaper—for conducting raids in our communities, like a recent sweep across the state including Santa Barbara County. Yes, violent offenders should be prosecuted and deported, but at what cost?
Trump voters didn’t care that he ran on a platform of racism, it only got them more excited. For years they’ve called undocumented immigrants “illegals.” Whether it’s shouted at a random brown-skinned person or emblazoned across the front page of the Santa Barbara News-Press—they laid the dehumanizing groundwork, declaring everyone who crosses the border a de facto criminal.
According to them, that includes the mother who had a baby ripped from her breast, and the exhausted parents told by federal officers that their kids were going to get medical care, but never saw them come back. It’s how they see the children housed in a hollowed-out Walmart in Texas, as if the whole situation wasn’t dystopian enough.
Some of these same people bought mugs that say “Liberal Tears” on them after Trump’s election. Well, I don’t know if they have mugs big enough for the tears shed by all those parents and children, kept behind bars or in cages of chain-link fence.
If you’re a Republican anything like First Lady Laura Bush, who wrote in an op-ed that Trump’s policy was “cruel” and “immoral,” I’d really like to hear from you. Seriously, write in, because the more I hear from Trump’s sycophants, the parrots who repeat his lies and obfuscate human rights, the less hope I have in the civility that America should stand for.
Do you even care? Could you ever reach a breaking point?
The Canary is ruffled this week. Send your thoughts to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 21-28, 2018.
