Shithole

I've tried my best this past year to avoid blogging political posts. I mean, why bother? If you voted for the Cheeto Benito, I'm not going to change your mind. And if you thought I was sexist for not being fully enthralled with Hillary Clinton, well, I'm probably not going to change your mind either.

I got a response the other day to my comment that Trump calling for an examination of our libel laws, so that someone who makes false and defamatory statements can be held accountable, should be careful lest he be hoist by his own petard. "You're still upset about losing the election?"

I'm like, are you even awake a few hours a day? I'm not upset that Hillary isn't President. In fact, I blame her because in the cockamamy scheme we've created, she was the alternative to an obviously bigoted and ignorant jerk. And she was a shitty candidate. I voted for her, but I puked in my mouth a little bit doing so.

So this week Trump is supposedly negotiating a bipartisan deal on immigration, and he complains about why we can't have more Norwegians and fewer Haitians and refers to African countries as 'shitholes.'

Now calling African countries or Haiti 'shitholes' isn't automatically racist in my view. Good government is unknown in Haiti and honestly most of the African continent too. American and European foreign policy is a lot of the reason why these countries are, to varying degrees, shitholes, but that doesn't change what they are.

You prefer Norway? Well, yeah, those people are mostly white. They also have a robust social safety net and universal healthcare so how exactly do you propose to entice them to emigrate to a country where what little of that they'd have is under fire from you? What is the big force driving Norwegians to emigrate to America?

But even if those African countries are shitholes, leaving aside the fact that a head of state should know better than to talk of his peers that way, are you upset that people want to upgrade from their shitholes? Norwegians might not have much to envy in American life, but folks in Haiti, El Salvador, the Congo, etc, even with Donald Trump as prez we might seem like an upgrade.

The people who come from these places enhance our country, they contribute to our economy. And when we 'chain migrate' their families in, that's a plus, too. If you had to start over in a strange country where you might not even initially speak the language, are you less of a burden for having no family and community links there? Personally, if I had to learn Hungarian and figure out life in Budapest, having a dozen family members who had already navigated this world would make that all seem much, much more doable.

Wanting to emigrate to America to make a better life is not a goddamn crime. Even people who do so 'illegally,' pump your brakes. Betting on NCAA brackets is illegal, speeding is illegal, we don't throw people out of the country for it.

I'm not upset about 'losing the election.' I didn't lose it, but America did. I'm skeptical of Democrats as an alternative, the enemy of your enemy is not automatically your friend. Trump isn't a Republican, he isn't a conservative, he's an existential threat because he doesn't even know what he's gotten into and wouldn't care about anything that matters if he did.