by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
As I write this, it’s the morning after we learned that the United States government is holding extremely young immigrant children in “tender age” facilities. I spend some time last night talking to my evangelical sister, trying to convince her that while, yes, the nation’s immigration policy is in dire need of fixing, we needed to fix the specific policy problem causing such children to be put in harms way.
Alas, she didn’t really get around to agreeing with me the way I hoped she would.
So while I have liberal fever dreams that this, at last, would be the thing to leave a significant welt on Trump’s administration, if I can’t get someone like my sister to have enough empathy and compassion for these children to focus on repealing the specific policy that got us into the situation in the first place, that’s just not going to happen.
The United States is just too divided at this point. The economy is doing too well and “securing borders” is too important to Trump’s base for that to happen. Whatever solution there happens to come about on this issue won’t happen any time soon. It could be a week or more before Congress finally gets its head out of its ass long enough to come to some sort of fix that Trump could very well then promptly veto because it doesn’t give him is damn wall.
So we’re likely to have a pitched political battle for the foreseeable future and either Trump manages to distract us with an even larger outrage or he doesn’t. Either he makes yet another cold, hard political calculation and buckles down for a long hard fight or when he does that calculation he decides to give in and blame the Democrats for whatever reason he can pull out of his ass.
Therefore, while I still believe we’re better than this, there probably won’t be any cut-and-dried solution to this problem. Trump will survive, if not prosper after a few bumps and we’ll move on to the next shitstorm. I wish I was wrong, but, alas, it does not appear that I am.
But if you do want to get a more clear-cut result, you’re going to have to raise some hell. Raise hell in a way that gets people’s attention. It may be our only hope.
