On Father’s Day, considering family values and all the things my dear Da has taught me, I wrote a long, angry post about the United States immigration policy under the current regime. It was neither unbiased or measured in its argument. I’m just about to start a new job with social media savvy employers, so I decided to think on my piece a bit before I posted it.Thinking on things is new for me, but in the modern era of “lasts-forever-no-take-backs-for-all-of-eternity,” I thought I might give ‘er a go.
When I went to look at it again, my computer told me I was trying to edit something that didn’t exist, and suggested that my post may have been deleted.
Russians? The FCC? The elusive MPAA? HUAC? The Pittsburgh Post?
We may never know.
Anyway, here is the gist of a post so dangerous, half-dozens of people were denied seeing it.
“[This week we saw] the soul-deadening inversion of American values, when Jeff Sessions and Sarah Huckabee Sanders cited the Bible to justify ripping children from their parents at the border – including a baby being breast-fed by her Honduran mother. The Statue of Liberty wept.
Sessions is on a vile tear. A week ago, he vitiated the policy that made it possible to give asylum to women who are victims of domestic abuse or who are raped or threatened by the sort of gang members Trump decries as “animals.”*
The image is by Rob Rogers. Read about his recent sacking here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/opinion/cartoonist-rob-rogers-trump-fired.html
To be fair, there are two sides to every story, even if the story in question is a picture worth a thousand words, so here’s that for ya. I don’t want my new employers to think I make a practice of being politically affiliated with any one side, for what good comes of speaking your own truth when there are so many truths to tell. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/16/pittsburgh-cartoonist-firing-publisher-gazette-650389
This whole thing might have died, but it turns out some people just won’t shut up about the importance of freedom of expression. http://wesa.fm/post/post-gazette-reporters-editors-speak-out-newspaper-ad#stream/0
Some people are unapologetic about their views and feel like it”s worth the risk – in this case, of speaking against the mandates of an employer and risking termination. Which brings me to the words I used in my re-post. They belong to Maureen Dowd, and are from a column she wrote in Sunday’s New York Times, entitled “Psychos on The Potomac.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/opinion/sunday/psychos-on-the-potomac.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fsunday&action=click&contentCollection=sunday®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=10&pgtype=sectionfront
Maureen Dowd is fierce. She calls it like she sees it, and she’s smart, too. Did you have to look up ‘vitiated’? I did. She doesn’t hide behind others words because she’s scared of being censored -she just lets them fly, big black-winged sentences circling in a white sky to swoop down on their target.
I think I’m going to publish this post quick-like without thinking. I’m going to act courageously, in a weenie kind of way. I hope my dad will be proud.
*Lest we forget, Trump also called these guys “animals”, because he has a really good brain and he’s said a lot of things, and knows if people are telling the truth and being honest in the first five minutes of looking at them, and can tell if they want to be grabbed by the pussy or not, because he is a master of the deal, and because he is a very stable genius. Again, his words, not mine. http://hyperscapes.com/trumps-assessment-selected-quotes/
http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/centralparkfive/about-central-park-five/
Maybe the editorial cartoonists aren’t the ones who should be censored. At least they don’t claim their opinions are fact and all else is fake news.