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What do green cards mean?

It is fortunate how incompetent Musso-lazy and his ‘team’ are at the margins – they do plenty of damage between the lines. People with know-how need not apply, one-way loyalty visible from space, and good help always being hard to find all add up to a thick stack of not understanding how to avoid things like catastrophic wars and spiraling debt pushing up interest rates.

Maybe this will discredit the notion of government as business [ed. Oui, je sais: sweet summer child]. But fascism also wrecks the ordinariness of difficult times and turns them into nightmares, even and especially with a regime that has introduced difficult times on stilts for ordinary people:

“DHS is NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake.” “There are no ‘indiscriminate’ stops.” Allegations of “racial profiling are disgusting, reckless and categorically FALSE.” “The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using force.” “ICE does not zip tie or restrain children.”

But that is precisely what is happening, and at a far larger scale than previously reported.

ProPublica has tallied and cataloged more than 500 cases of immigration agents holding citizens during the current administration. Imagine, and it’s not so hard to do, so many fellow citizens going about their daily routines now with escape plans, alerts, and hiding places as part of their stress portfolio. What does that do to people? If you answered which people, that’s a good place to start.

 

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The moral burden of war

Sebastian Junger, journalist/author of The Perfect Storm and more recently a contributor to a film about soldiers (and the war) in Afghanistan, has a good Memorial Day reflection on war and what it does to people:

Typically, warriors were welcomed home by their entire community and underwent rituals to spiritually cleanse them of the effect of killing. Otherwise, they were considered too polluted to be around women and children. Often there was a celebration in which the fighters described the battle in great, bloody detail. Every man knew he was fighting for his community, and every person in the community knew that their lives depended on these young men. These gatherings must have been enormously cathartic for both the fighters and the people they were defending. A question like the one recently posed to me wouldn’t begin to make sense in a culture such as the Yanomami of Brazil and Venezuela or the Comanche.

Our enormously complex society can’t just start performing tribal rituals designed to diminish combat trauma, but there may be things we can do. The therapeutic power of storytelling, for example, could give combat veterans an emotional outlet and allow civilians to demonstrate their personal involvement. On Memorial Day or Veterans Day, in addition to traditional parades, communities could make their city or town hall available for vets to tell their stories. Each could get, say, 10 minutes to tell his or her experience at war.

Attendance could not be mandatory, but on that day “I support the troops” would mean spending hours listening to our vets. We would hear a lot of anger and pain. We would also hear a lot of pride. Some of what would be said would make you uncomfortable, whether you are liberal or conservative, military or nonmilitary, young or old. But there is no point in having a conversation about war that is not completely honest.

Whole thing, read the.