Bigotry’s irony

bigot

Last summer when those who, like Chicken Little screaming that the sky was falling, were looking for yet another thing to scare people about whether it was in order to get votes, increase or keep happy its news channel viewership, or find an excuse to justify expressing their bigotry seeing no way they could be faulted, a lot of things were said about the children coming across the Southern border to get away from those too ready to kill them, or force them into sexual bondage in Central America, not the least being that they were bringing disease across the border and would harm the people of this country.

Along with the ten year olds coming to take jobs and vote for Obama, their bringing disease into the country was seized upon as a justifiable reason to yell at them, hold demonstration against them, and pretty much make things up about them.

They were secret and well disguised gang members.

They were members of ISIS coming across as little time release terrorists.

They were going to syphon off whatever money school districts had in spite of their not attending local schools.

They were going to escape from processing centers and disappear with no trace into the general population and from their hidden lairs apply for and get public assistance.

There were many theoretical reasons to fear these kids, but none were based on fact.

And in one little bit of irony, while all the scary things were supposed to be caused by them, when a real disease entered the country, it came in by way of a plane ticket bought by a man who entered the country legally.

How about that.

Now the prophets will just move on to the next thing when they find a false threat to scare people with, stretching it out of all reasonable proportions for their own advantage.

The whole thing with the kids is now in the past, we have moved on, and some other group will become the next excuse for the expressing of bigotry, until, of course, the next group after that comes along.

Something tells me that group will be people who get Ebola who will need to be locked into concentration camps with no visits from families, or, as one politician has suggested, simply be put to death since they will die anyway.

Those people who rely on fear as their preferred tactic seem to just plow through people and events to get to their next source of fear, and not look back at the damage they have done to the groups they have already plowed over and the people who actually listened to them..

Follow up.

assault

Yesterday I wrote a blog about those who claim they are persecuted while they do the persecuting. They want to be able to get away with what they do by making people feel guilty for noticing.

You have to wonder where this comes from.

Perhaps they learn this tactic at an early age from observation, or they are allowed to practice this in high school, for example, until they are good at it.

Eric Martin, a student at Highland Springs High School in Henrico, Virginia, is facing two charges of assault while suffering from a head injury and a broken hand after having been involved in a brawl that pitted him against at least four other students that began when he hit one of the students who has been bullying him and calling him Gay slurs for a long time.

Eric is considered the aggressor because he threw the first punch, but the bullying is being ignored as is the fact that even if it is justifiable to bring charges against him from hitting the student first, the friends of that student who then punched and beat on Eric have not been charged with anything.

They apparently are allowed to throw their first punches without consequence.

Eric’s family is fighting back, having gone to the court to file their own charges.

As family advocate Tammy Motola explained, “It’s always the perpetrators that get away with the crime. When the victims have finally had enough, after being verbally attacked and bullied for years and they snap…they are the ones that are penalized.”

In addition to the two assault charges, Eric is not allowed to return to school until he signs a student threat documentation form, admitting that he also threatened the school even though an administrator at the school admitted that this allegation was based only on hearsay.

Obviously they are holding the kid hostage and want him to admit to an alleged crime by signing a form admitting the allegation to be true so that it can be presented in court, and used against him.

Apparently, while the victim, who had finally had enough, is being punished, those who bullied him and those who beat him so that he spent nine days in the hospital are being treated as victims.

I worked in schools where the kid who threw the first punch in any fight was punished, but the others who entered the fight were disciplined as well.

This is not the case in this situation.

To ease tensions, the school administrators have softened their demand that Eric sign the admission of guilt form for the alleged threat to the school before returning to school.

He can attend any other high school in the city, just not the school he attends now.

So add inconvenience to the list of what this kid has to deal with besides the physical and emotion suffering caused by the bullying and the beating that was justified, apparently, by one punch.

This is a classic method of dealing with bullies. While the bully is allowed to stay where he is, future bullying is not prevented any other way than by inconveniencing the victim.

Eventually the bully will just find another victim on the home turf.

The message being sent is clear.

Persecution?

same

Unless you are one of those people who thinks Catholics aren’t Christian, you know that all the denominations of Christianity in the United States makes that belief system the largest in the country.

Every president has been Christian, as have the vast majority of politicians both federal and state, and the members of the Supreme Court.

When you mention religious broadcasting and flip through all the cable channels, the majority of them are Christian too.

So it seems a little phony when people who have basically had their way since before this country was founded claim they are being persecuted by those who are not Christian.

It’s merely that whenever anyone fights back, or gives back what the “christians” (note the small ‘c’) give out, the people who have appointed themselves as the spokespeople of Christianity claim they are being persecuted. If what they get is persecution, isn’t what they do unto others persecution as well?

Now a little unearned self-pity is one thing, but to take on the role of the oppressed and persecuted by making false comparisons is another.

Take the example of recently elected Texas state senator Charles Perry who claims that Christians in the United States are treated the same as Jews in Nazi Germany.

Referring to concentration camps, Senator Perry said in remarks after his swearing in,
“There were 10,000 people that were paraded into a medical office under the guise of a physical. As they stood with their back against the wall, they were executed with a bullet through the throat. Before they left, 10,000 people met their fate that way.

Is it not the same than when our government continues to perpetuate laws that lead citizens away from God? The only difference is that the fraud of the Germans was more immediate and whereas the fraud of today’s government will not be exposed until the final days and will have eternal-lasting effects.”

The basic answer from any thinking person is, “Duh, no.”

You go girl!

warrren

Then there are those tapes.

No, not the ones where Mitt Romney got caught denigrating 47% of Americans as lazy, and not the ones where Mitch McConnell was heard to say that if Republicans take over the Senate they will hold the budget hostage unless they get everything they want even if it leads to another government shut-down.

These are the tapes of conversations between Federal Reserve officials that show how cozy the Federal Reserve is with Wall Street.

Remember Carmen Segara?

For those who don’t, she was the bank examiner for the Federal Reserve in 2012, who, after only seven months on the job, lost it because she had made a negative report on Goldman Sachs.

However, what no one knew at the time was that she had made secret recordings of meetings after noticing the lack of regulation of banks of which the New York Fed was guilty, and one of the things she managed to record was the Feds discussing an action of Goldman Sachs that may not have been illegal, but was certainly not correct and for which GS should have been disciplined.

The release of the contents of the meetings now wasn’t a one shot deal way after the fact as Segara says there were a number of times that she had told her bosses about questionable practices at Goldman Sachs.

One statement by an officer of GS, “once clients became wealthy enough, certain consumer laws didn’t apply to them”, really bothered her, but her boss told her to amend the minutes of the meeting in which this was said so there would be no trace of it.
I personally think she did great as this was something I began to do when it became obvious when I was teaching that my evaluator had an agenda that was to result in the OKC school district wrongfully dismissing me, but which was reversed by the District Court and then upheld in the Appellate Court based in part on the recordings, videos, and still pictures produced in my classes every time the evaluator came in the room.

It was also what validated me in my retirement when the same helped establish that my last principal was, indeed, manipulating student grades and attendance so as to have it appear his methods were working, and not that the teachers he was forcing out of the school were ineffective.

It helps remove the “he said/she said” business.

Hell hath no fury and all that.

Regarding the released tapes, according to Senator Elizabeth Warren, “You really do, for a moment, get to be the fly on the wall that watches all of it, and there it is to be exposed to everyone: the cozy relationship, the fact that the Fed is more concerned about its relationship with a too-big-to-fail bank than it is with protecting the American public”.

Warren believes, and rightly so, that regulators work for the American people not the banks.

As she said on NPR, “A regulator doesn’t say to a big financial institution: ‘Hey! Step right up here. Get your toes on the line, and so long as you can make a legal argument that you have not crossed the line then, hey, we’re — we’re all cool here. That’s not the way regulation of large financial institutions is supposed to work — they’re supposed to be using judgment. And remember, part of this judgment is about whether or not there has been compliance with the law. The fact that Goldman could mount a legal defense here is not really the point of these tapes. The point of these tapes is that the regulators are backing off long before anyone’s in court making a legal argument about whether or not they came right up to the line or they crossed over the line.”

What does Warren want?

“Congress must hold oversight hearings on the disturbing issues raised by today’s whistleblower report when it returns in November, because it’s our job to make sure our financial regulators are doing their jobs. When regulators care more about protecting big banks from accountability than they do about protecting the American people from risky and illegal behavior on Wall Street, it threatens our whole economy. We learned this the hard way in 2008.”

Vote for me, boogah, boogah!

senate

It seems America is now in  a very odd phase. It has an almost morbid glee in finding some new things that threaten the world as we know it, and the more at the same time the better.

An oddly enough politicians from all parties and persuasions who are  running for office have the answers to address it all.

 

Let the patriotic competition begin.

flag

With our now finally getting around to bombing Syria, something that some high ranking politicians have been demanding, and with calls for boots on the ground, it is time once again to stock up on our American flags, Stars and Bars decals that proclaim we love the good Ol’ U.S of A, and to arrange for all those photo ops and videos on the news of soldiers returning from deployment and surprising their kids at a ball game or Christmas party so we all feel so much better about sending our kids to fight for others who just put down their weapons and high-tail it at the first sign of a battle, and can get distracted so we can ignore the ones who come home in boxes.

The patriot competitions are about to begin, and the “I support the troops” trope will be as common as a Christmas or season’s greeting in a few weeks.

Flags are going to pop up everywhere, and will be allowed to rot in the rain and winds because they will have served their purpose of making the person hanging them feel good without feeling obligated to show true respect for the flag by taking care of them.

New crispy flags are good for pictures, but in time they are just rags on the fences of overpasses, and the attention the flag hanger got become old news.

And, few will even check to see that the majority of those discount flags they put on fence posts and on car antennae, or the ones they have on the little holders that attach to their rear car door windows are made in China by the workers who got their job from unemployed Americans because it is cheaper to pay them slave wages.

Trolls who live to leave comments after web site news articles will begin to decide who is truly American and patriotic based on nothing more than their believing that somehow calling people “socialists” and “liberals” will have a lasting effect, and is somehow a legitimate judgment.

Conservative news media will fan the flames of division so that they will appear to be the deciders of patriotism, and will be believed by their fans who are shrinking in numbers and basically repeat what they are told because critical thinking is the sign of hating America.

And as we head to elections we will have a whole new arena with politicians labeling people, demanding military actions that they will then criticize when they begin.

The season of warm and fuzzy patriotism competitiveness  is about to begin.

Reality will have no place.