Americas Kristallnacht

The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled in favor of evil. It has ruled in favor of a policy driven by racism and white nationalism as embodied and expressed by the Trump Regime. It has ruled in favor of what, if no remedy of law is passed by the US Congress, will be America’s Kristallnacht.

With Temporary Protected Status, Haitian and Syrian refugees in the US are about to be ended by the Trump administration, a decision rooted in racism, white nationalism, and inhumanity, and nothing else. I see four kinds of people.

I see those who are indifferent to it and consider it a non-issue. I ask of them, “How can forcibly repatriating people to conditions, which even the US State Department recognizes and unsafe, in their return to their nations of origin will be a likely death sentence be a matter of indifference?” How can the suffering of your fellow human beings be a matter of indifference? All that is required for evil to flourish is for good people to stand by and do nothing. And that is exactly what you are doing.

I see those actively cheering on this barbarity. Those for whom the racism and white nationalism of the Trump regime have enabled and emboldened them to actively and openly express their own racism, their contempt, their hatred, for anyone they see as unfit to breathe the same air as they do.

And I see those of us, who out of concern for the monstrousness of the Trump regime’s actions, call and write to our elected officials, contribute to humanitarian organizations, and those who are able, to actively work to protect the lives of the Haitian and Syrian refugees who live here, now, in America.

Of these four kinds of people, it is to the first two that I direct my observations.

There is an historical parallel here. We saw it in the wake of the Weimar Republic as it slid into the abyss of Nazism and the atrocities of the Holocaust. Many Germans stood by, in the face of the atrocities perpetrated in the name of the German people, as their Jewish neighbors were herded into cattle cars, sent to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and other death camps, never to be seen again.

To those actively cheering this policy, your brazen and full-throated support for it reveals much about you. It reveals your insecurities and your willingness to believe, as you have been repeatedly told, that others are to blame for your troubles, your hardships, your failures. It reveals, especially as so many of you identify as Christians, your hypocrisy. It reveals your willing abandonment of Christ’s teachings, in using those teachings to justify your bigotry…your inhumanity…your hatred…of the other. You don’t get to characterize America as a “Christian” nation while refusing to feed the hungry, house the homeless, provide care for the sick, and provide a safe haven for the refugee.

As America approaches the 250th anniversary of its existence as a constitutional republic, we stand at a crossroads. Do we live up to the promise of the Founders and stop the implementation of this atrocity by Trump and his regime? Or, do we abandon all pretense of living up to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and allow this atrocity to pass unremarked?

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