It’s Different When Democrats Deport

In many respects, Joe Biden is continuing the Donald Trump immigration policies that he campaigned against. He is deporting more immigrants. He is even re-launching the previous administration’s “remain in Mexico” policy that exposes applicants for political asylum to retaliation by drug cartels.

Why Do You Want to Be When You Grow up?

The shooting of 20 year old Daunte Wright by a Minnesota police officer sparked yet another round of protests by people outraged at cops shooting unarmed Black men. You have to wonder, why would anyone want to become a cop?

Actually, Forced Child Separations Are All-American

“This is not who we are.” Americans are saying this about the forced separation of children from their migrant parents at the border with Mexico. They said it about torture. Yet we keep doing these horrible things over and over again. So it isn’t really true. These horrible acts are exactly who we are.

Some Irrationalities Are More Equal Than Others

A measles epidemic is being blamed on anti-vaccine activist parents who refuse to have their kids vaccinated with the MMR shot. Liberals are decrying these people as irrational science deniers, yet are willing to grant exceptions to people who oppose vaccines due to their religious beliefs.

Breaking Modern Essay: Don’t Lie to Your Kids About Santa Claus

Originally published at Breaking Modern:

Like most children, I grew up in a house without a chimney or fireplace. This made the Santa myth, which relies on a child’s unawareness of the size of the earth and its population, immediately less credible. How did the jolly fat guy gain access to our home, I questioned my mother?

No answer. I could see the wheels turning.

“He couldn’t possibly fit down the flue? Could he?” I tried to help.

I opened the utility closet. The pipe from the central heater and air conditioning convection unit to the ceiling was about six inches in diameter. Santa ferret?

Mom gave up. (If this convo happened today, she could have ordered a prevarification aid like Santa’s Magical House Key.)

Anyway, mom sat me down and confessed the truth: there’s no Santa, just a 10th-century Nordic myth. There was a reason, after all, that gifts labeled “from Santa” shared the same distinct handwriting as my mom’s.

When I tell this story to friends who are parents, they react with horror. “How awful! She deprived you of your imagination! Didn’t she want you to enjoy your childhood?” That point of view is represented by a 2010 essay in the San Francisco Chronicle: “All these childhood myths serve a brilliant purpose: a gentle way for kids to learn well-intended parents are not always reliable sources of truth.”

Awesome.

A 2012 Slate piece argues that not every lie is created equal: “First: Let go of any guilt you have about duping your kids. Santa belongs in the ‘good lie’ pile because parents invoke him for their kids’ sake; bad lies are the ones parents use to deflect blame or avoid responsibility—we can’t go to the playground today because its closed, when really, you’re just too lazy to get off the couch.”

I come down on the exact opposite side: A lie is a lie is a lie.

My mother’s decision to tell the truth about the Christmas myth is something for which I will be grateful my entire life. It certainly doesn’t seem to have negatively impacted my imagination: I’m a successful cartoonist and an excellent storyteller. But it did establish at an early age that I could count on my mother to tell me the unvarnished, honest truth. I knew, for many years following that incident, that I could count upon her for a no bullshit view of the world. It strengthened my trust in her, and therefore in my love for her. It was definitely a win-win.

While other parents kept lying to their elementary school-aged and even older children, especially about sex, my mother replied to my question about the birds and the bees by taking down her college biology book and showing what went in where and what happened after that.

Don’t get me wrong. My mother and I didn’t have a perfect relationship. Breaches of faith opened up between us. Mostly, however, this occurred not when my mom tried to protect me from some kind of unpleasant truth, but when she tried to bullshit me.

Never lie to someone unless you are sure you will get away with it.

For whatever reason, my mom tried to blow smoke up my tuckus more when I was a teenager and therefore even less likely to fall for bullshit – especially since she had already made the “mistake” of teaching me critical thinking and reading between the lines. Suddenly God, previously an abstraction, was marketed to me as a real, living entity who knew everything that I was up to and would punish me if I did wrong.

Definitely a mistake to try this bigger version of the Santa myth on me. I remember thinking to myself, “wow, she really thinks I’m stupid. I don’t know why I would confide in her. And when I experienced teen crises – sex, drugs, depression, academic problems – I became less likely to confide or share.

You don’t need to be a psychologist specializing in early childhood to know that trust creates the strongest bond between humans. Whether it’s a friend or a parent, think about it: as an adult, you believe in people whom you can count upon to give it to you straight.

Children aren’t stupider than adults. They’re certainly more observant. Don’t insult their intelligence.

And don’t worry about stifling their imagination.

“The Santa Lie…does not actually promote imagination or imaginative play,” William Irwin and David Kyle Johnson write in Psychology Today. “Imagination involves pretending, and to pretend that something exists, one has to believe that thing doesn’t exist. Does the Christian “imagine” that Jesus rose from the dead? Does the Muslim “imagine” that Muhammed’s rode his horse Barack (Al Boraq) at lightening speed from Mecca to Jerusalem and then assended into heaven? Of course not; they believe these things are true. Tricking a child into literally believing that Santa exists doesn’t encourage imagination, it actually stifles it. If you really want to encourage imagination in your children, tell them that Santa doesn’t exist, but that you are going to pretend like he does anyway on Christmas morning.”

This Christmas season, don’t give in to the temptation of signing off on a ridiculously transparent lie that will begin to undermine your relationship with your child. Tell her the truth. She can take it. She’ll love you more for it.

Spaced Out

Possible GOP Presidential candidate Marco Rubio, whose father entered the US illegally, says the US is full up, that there just isn’t any room left in the US for new immigrants, including the children arriving at the border with Mexico. But when you actually consider how much space there is in the country, that’s obviously untrue.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Those Kids Crossing the Border from Mexico Wouldn’t Be There if Obama Hadn’t Supported a Coup the Media Doesn’t Talk About

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If you’re reading this, you probably follow the news. So you’ve probably heard of the latest iteration of the “crisis at the border”: tens of thousands of children, many of them unaccompanied by an adult, crossing the desert from Mexico into the United States, where they surrender to the Border Patrol in hope of being allowed to remain here permanently. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention and hearing system has been overwhelmed by the surge of children and, in some cases, their parents. The Obama Administration has asked Congress to approve new funding to speed up processing and deportations of these illegal immigrants.

Even if you’ve followed this story closely, you probably haven’t heard the depressing backstory — the reason so many Central Americans are sending their children on a dangerous thousand-mile journey up the spine of Mexico, where they ride atop freight trains, endure shakedowns by corrupt police and face rapists, bandits and other predators. (For a sense of what it’s like, check out the excellent 2009 film “Sin Nombre.”)

NPR and other mainstream news outlets are parroting the White House, which blames unscrupulous “coyotes” (human smugglers) for “lying to parents, telling them that if they put their kids in the hands of traffickers and get to the United States that they will be able to stay.” True: the coyotes are saying that in order to gin up business. Also true: U.S. law has changed, and many of these kids have a strong legal case for asylum. Unfortunately, U.S. officials are ignoring the law.

The sad truth is that this “crisis at the border” is yet another example of “blowback.”

Blowback is an unintended negative consequence of U.S. political, military and/or economic intervention overseas — when something we did in the past comes back to bite us in the ass. 9/11 is the classic example; arming and funding radical Islamists in the Middle East and South Asia who were less grateful for our help than angry at the U.S.’ simultaneous backing for oppressive governments (The House of Saud, Saddam, Assad, etc.) in the region.

More recent cases include U.S. support for Islamist insurgents in Libya and Syria, which destabilized both countries and led to the murders of U.S. consular officials in Benghazi, and the rise of ISIS, the guerilla army that imperils the U.S.-backed Maliki regime in Baghdad, respectively.

Confusing the issue for casual American news consumers is that the current border crisis doesn’t involve the usual Mexicans traveling north in search of work. Instead, we’re talking about people from Central American nations devastated by a century of American colonialism and imperialism, much of that intervention surprisingly recent. Central American refugees are merely transiting through Mexico.

“The unaccompanied children crossing the border into the United States are leaving behind mainly three Central American countries, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. The first two are among the world’s most violent and all three have deep poverty, according to a Pew Research report based on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) information,” reports NBC News. “El Salvador ranked second in terms of homicides in Latin America in 2011, and it is still high on the list. Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are among the poorest nations in Latin America. Thirty percent of Hondurans, 17 percent of Salvadorans and 26 percent of Guatemalans live on less than $2 a day.”

The fact that Honduras is the biggest source of the exodus jumped out at me. That’s because, in 2009, the United States government — under President Obama — tacitly supported a military coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras. “Washington has a very close relationship with the Honduran military, which goes back decades,” The Guardian noted at the time. “During the 1980s, the US used bases in Honduras to train and arm the Contras, Nicaraguan paramilitaries who became known for their atrocities in their war against the Sandinista government in neighbouring Nicaragua.”

Honduras wasn’t paradise under President Manuel Zelaya. Since the coup, however, the country has entered a downward death spiral of drug-related bloodshed and political revenge killings that crashed the economy, brought an end to law, order and civil society, and now has some analysts calling it a “failed state” along the lines of Somalia and Afghanistan during the 1990s.

“Zelaya’s overthrow created a vacuum in security in which military and police were now focused more on political protest, and also led to a freeze in international aid that markedly worsened socio-economic conditions,” Mark Ungar, professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York, told The International Business Times. “The 2009 coup, asserts [Tulane] professor Aaron Schneider, gave the Honduran military more political and economic leverage, at the same time as the state and political elites lost their legitimacy, resources and the capacity to govern large parts of the country.”

El Salvador and Guatemala, also narcostates devastated by decades of U.S. support for oppressive, corrupt right-wing dictatorships, are suffering similar conditions.

Talk about brass! The United States does it everything it can to screw up Central America — and then acts surprised when desperate people show up at its front gate trying to escape the (U.S.-caused) carnage. Letting the kids stay — along with their families — is less than the least we could do.

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and cartoonist, is the author of “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan,” out Sept. 2. Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

 

 

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