The most depressing five-word Google search I can think of—and I can think of a lot of depressing five-word Google searches—is gained all the weight back. Losing weight is not the hard part. The hard part is living with your diet for years, maybe the rest of your life.
Since its founding in the early 20th century, the U.S. Border Patrol has operated with near-complete impunity, arguably serving as the most politicized and abusive branch of federal law enforcement — even more so than the FBI during J. Edgar Hoover’s directorship.
The 1924 Immigration Act tapped into a xenophobia with deep roots in the U.S. history. The law effectively eliminated immigration from Asia and sharply reduced arrivals from southern and eastern Europe. Most countries were now subject to a set quota system, with the highest numbers assigned to western Europe. As a result, new arrivals to the United States were mostly white Protestants. Nativists were largely happy with this new arrangement, but not with the fact that Mexico, due to the influence of U.S. business interests that wanted to maintain access to low-wage workers, remained exempt from the quota system. “Texas needs these Mexican immigrants,” said the state’s Chamber of Commerce.
Having lost the national debate when it came to restricting Mexicans, white supremacists — fearing that the country’s open-border policy with Mexico was hastening the “mongrelization” of the United States — took control of the U.S. Border Patrol, also established in 1924, and turned it into a frontline instrument of race vigilantism. As the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has shown, the patrol’s first recruits were white men one or two generations removed from farm life. Some had a military or county sheriff background, while others transferred from border-town police departments or the Texas Rangers — all agencies with their own long tradition of unaccountable brutality. Their politics stood in opposition to the big borderland farmers and ranchers. They didn’t think that Texas — or Arizona, New Mexico, and California — needed Mexican migrants.
When you look at the words that he [Donald Trump] uses, which are historic dog whistles of white supremacy. When you look at how he reacted to the Charlottesville incident, where neo-Nazis murdered a woman, versus how he manufactures crises like immigrants seeking legal refuge on our borders, it’s — it’s night and day…
Reading a marred book page is eternally distracting. My eye is immediately drawn to the imperfection and I sometimes can’t even make sense of the sentence in which the blemish occurs. Not because I can’t read it, but because I can’t get beyond the hurt. Coffee rings are chic, I know, on the cover of a book or a notebook page. It’s one of the truest clichés of the literary crowd. Coffee and a good book. Not coffee in a good book! I tried to get back into the flow of the narrative. My eye kept wandering back to the spot I’d unintentionally marred—I’d violated my own principles. Unintentionally of course—this isn’t Starbucks where the heat is set at a reasonable level and you don’t have to scrunch up to keep warm. But still. But still.
You’ve got to hand it to capitalism, convincing everyone that “freedom” meant obeying your boss or starving was a pretty incredible achievement.
So who is really out of the mainstream? Warren, or Donald Trump and Republicans who’ve stripped away American’s healthcare? Ocasio-Cortez, or Donald Trump and Republicans who oppose what most Americans actually want on everything from healthcare and taxes to minimum wage, gun background checks, climate protections and yes, even immigration? (That last issue, you’ll recall, has kept the government shut down for more than two weeks.) Seems clear to me. Trump ran as a populist, but governs like Marie Antoinette. And a sleeping, scammed America is finally waking up.
I’ve also come to believe that our streets are haunted by ghosts as well through a sort of past and present collective trauma that remains unresolved. That might appear to be an extreme statement except when you consider the body toll. Since 1899, more than 3.6 million people in the United States have died from car crashes, which is greater than the approximate 1.2 million American soldiers who have died in all American wars. We understand this collective trauma from our fear of the streets, which almost feels instinctual, but rather it’s learned and inherited trauma.
sonneillonv
