Shame! Shame!

On the Fourth of July we celebrated the United States of America and glorified our democracy.

Two days later the New York Times reported on a group of lawyers visiting the Clint, TX detention facility where our government, just raucously celebrated, detains about 300 children ranging in age from 5 months to 17 years. Yes, you read that right-- FIVE months old. Surely an infant did not come to the US border without a parent or some other adult who brought that child. But now this infant is on its own. The older children, themselves seriously distressed, are tasked with taking care of the little ones.

I hold my seven month old grandson and think about this story. I know how utterly dependent infants are. I can imagine those children wailing in their misery and I weep.

Among these children are a number of teen mothers who gave birth very recently. All the children are filthy. Since crossing the border they have not been able to wash. They do not have water to wash, let alone soap or showers. They do not have toothbrushes or a change of clean clothes. The babies and infants do not have diapers. The government—OUR government—has argued in court that it has no obligations to allow the children to wash themselves or the clothes they have been wearing since coming into the country, often weeks ago. The government does not believe that it has obligations to acknowledge the immigrants’ most elementary dignity.

In El Paso, TX. “Border Patrol agents told us some of the detainees had been held in standing-room-only conditions for days or weeks,” the inspector general’s office said in its report, which noted that some detainees were observed standing on toilets in the cells “to make room and gain breathing space, thus limiting access to the toilets.” It is difficult not to think of Jews packed into box cars, standing room only, on the transport to extermination camps in the East.

One of the lawyers visiting the Clint, TX. Reported “ “So many children are sick, they have the flu, and they’re not being properly treated.” The same reports from different detention sites, are available on the websites of the American Civil Liberties Union, the American friends Service Committee, the Mennonite Central Committee and other non-profit organizations.

Having been a child refugee myself, these reports distressed me deeply. I began to think that perhaps there would be a way of fostering or adopting one of these unfortunate children in order to save at least one child. But all I found out was that the government cruelty extended also to fostering and adoption. It turns out that the government did send some of the children they had taken from families at the border to the largest adoption agency run by very right-wing evangelical organizations. The Border Patrol meanwhile was making no efforts to find the families whose children they had taken away. But videos of children being taken from their parents to be given out to adoption were being shown to refugees to make them “behave.” One woman was persuaded to retract her application for asylum by threatening to give her children out to adoption. Adoption has become a tool for suppressing refugees.

All of this happens in the context of steeply restricted availability of children ready to be adopted. A few years ago, American parents looking for children to adopt had children available from many foreign country such as Russia or China. Both of these countries have since prohibited foreign adoptions. So have many other countries. Fewer children are available for adoption in the US today. Fox News provocateur Laura Ingraham, herself an adoptive mother, was calling to “make adoption easier for American couples who want to adopt these kids.”

What can we do? The key lesson is that we are completely powerless although we are living in a democracy. Websites promising to tell us how we can ameliorate the suffering of children and adults at the border have two recommendations: send money to non-profits and write letters to your representatives in Congress. But the non-profits in spite of feverish activities in the Courts and elsewhere have been spectacularly ineffective. Congress after a long time has managed to pass a bill providing more resources for the Border patrol. But the bill provides no monitoring mechanisms. ICE and Border Patrol can do whatever they want, as before. Congress has not intervened on behalf of the refugee children being abused at the border. Neither non-profits nor Congress have been able to respond to the moral outrage of the majority of citizens. Citizens have been unable to act on their sense of justice being violated grossly at the border.

In the land of the free, citizens find themselves thwarted at every turn when they try to be faithful to their sense of justice. They can not put their understanding of what is right and wrong and of what they owe to their fellow humans at the border in practice.

Freedom does not amount to much when one is prevented from being a good person because all the power is in the hands of the morally damaged and the cruel.

What is Socialism?

 The headline in the Seattle newspaper was something like “Socialism Contested in Seattle City Council elections.” In national contests over the soul of the Democratic party, socialism is an important issue. A word that was taboo ten years ago, or less, is now important in the current political vocabulary. But what does it mean? Do you know what President Trump means by socialism, or Bernie Sanders? Most likely they attach different meanings to that word and when one condemns socialism and the other advocates it they are likely talking about very different things.

I want to talk about several quite different kinds of socialisms. The first identifies it with the system prevalent in the Soviet Union—USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics where the word “soviet” is Russian for “council.” Russian socialism, especially as represented by media in the West was an unrelentingly brutal dictatorship which killed millions or exiled them to harsh lives in Siberian prison camps. The essence of that kind of socialism is a violent and coercive government that did neither recognize nor respect any human rights. President Trump thinks that Bernie Sanders wants that kind of violent dictatorship for our country.

In actual fact, Sanders’ socialism is without doubt democratic; it will have no truck with authoritarianism, even the relatively moderate authoritarianism of Donald Trump or of other recent Presidents who went to war without Congressional approval and gradually extended the power of executive orders instead of asking Congress for legislation. The target of Sanders’ sort of socialism is inequality. Contrary to the practice of the current president, or of the Republican and Democratic presidents before him, the socialism of Bernie Sanders, often called “social democracy” will ask the rich to pay for assuring the poor a half-way decent life. 

Social democracy does not attempt to equalize the incomes of different citizens; it is content to accept the existence of persons who earn very little and persons who earn an enormous amount of money. But social democracy wants to make sure that everyone has enough to eat and does not have to worry about food. Everyone is entitled to decent housing, to the best available medical care and to an affordable—affordable for everyone—education. Social democracy relieves parents by providing adequate daycare for all children and assures all children a first rate education that begins in preschool. All of this calls for a great deal of money. The millionaires and billionaires will pay for that.

A different kind of socialism has capitalism as its target. In a capitalist economy, like ours, a small number of persons owns the factories, banks, modes of transportation—trucks, railroads and airlines—and modes of communication—radio and tv networks, internet providers, phone companies. Others own sources of energy, hospitals and medical clinics and privatized prisons. These owners hire the rest of us. Unless we belong to a strong union and can therefore bargain with them effectively, they pretty well pay us what they want. They hire and fire and thus determine whether we have work or not. They have far reaching power over the lives of the rest of us and our families.

The owners get rich from their ownership. They can use that money to buy many houses, in the US and abroad. They can use the money to invest in new businesses and get even richer. They can use the money to buy their children admission to the fanciest universities . They also use their wealth to influence the political processes , through lobbying, through graft, and through buying and controlling the media. A real democracy, by contrast, gives equal political power to everybody. In our democracy, the rich have effectively many more votes than ordinary people. They pretty well run the country.

The socialism that targets capitalism is also democratic but in a more radical way. Abolishing capitalism also abolishes the existence of a class of people who have a lot more political power than the rest of us. Abolishing capitalism restores political equality and thereby restores our democracy to some extent.

There are different versions of the socialism that will replace capitalism. Often socialism is described in predominantly economic terms as a system where the productive apparatus is not run by private owners—that would be capitalism—but by the workers in the enterprise. Often socialists add requirements for a socialist politics: the government is elected by all equally and its task is to serve all equally. No more governments for the rich and by the rich and of elected officials for sale to the rich.

To those two requirements for socialism—workers control of the economy and political equality for all – some people want to add a third requirement, that a socialist society will have different values. In a capitalist society profits are a more powerful incentive than human well-being. Companies will regularly pay starvation wages for the sake of their profits. In a capitalist society that is morally acceptable. People who get filthy rich by pay starvation wages are held up as models to our children. They have fancy buildings names after them. But from a socialist perspective exploiting your workers is pure wickedness. Human flourishing is a more important goal in a socialist society than profits.

In the upcoming elections socialism will be an issue—not the authoritarian dictatorship President Trump condemns rightly, but the socialisms that propose different means for restoring a society in which human lives are more important than money, and for restoring the political equality without which democracy remains a sham.

The choice is yours. What will it be: people before profits or profits above everything, even human lives?