It’s Easter morning, and Passover will end at sundown. The holidays are celebrated a few weeks after the vernal equinox, when the sun sits directly over the Earth’s equator. The position of the sun refocuses us from the confines of our abodes to the world beyond.
It’s Spring’s first day, the erasure of winter’s dreariness and a time of renewal. Grass greens. Daffodils bloom. The pink flowers pop from cherry blossom trees. Birds build nests. Windows open. Fresh air rushes in. Parks fill with children running in playgrounds and adults strolling. Partners, one less cheery than the other, push charts laden with 50 cubic feet of garden soil, flats of plants, and instruments of construction and destruction through the lots of Loews and Home Depot.
I’ve passed through many such seasons, and the wearisome thoughts of mowing the lawn, pruning trees, and weeding the garden smother the sweet swell of seasonal promise. The hope, while warming, is illusory. It clings to the temporal. It’s transitory. There’s another hope, one that springs eternal. It’s driven by the desire to achieve something greater and to sustain it, especially when it’s difficult. It’s drudging through a snowstorm, knocking on a door, asking if a neighbor is well, and drudging home. Hope is neither glorious nor hard. It drags us, sometimes screaming, to our better angels. It binds us, spouse to spouse, parent to child, and child to siblings, cousins, and strangers, enriching the living within an ever-widening circle.
Hope looks forward, but its best teachers wait in our myths and literature. Their stories are molded from facts twisted and turned so they bore to the core of our humanity. Within that core, we find our heroes, whether Odysseus, the famed heroic king from Homer’s Odysses, or Frodo, the unassuming hobbit from Tolkien’s trilogy. Each possesses courage, a forthright manner, and clarity of purpose, serving a need greater than himself. They are the qualities of Sir Gawain from the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Even modern superheroes, male and female, possess these characteristics. Whether written 2600 or 40 years ago, we forge our heroes in the same furnaces. They are better than us. They are the us we wish to be.
We presume that they each share the common rights of life and liberty. Without one, there can be no hope. That is what makes the stories of Passover and Easter moving. Passover recalls the last plague to strike Egypt. It freed Jews and put them on a 40-year journey to the land of Canaan, as promised to the descendants of Abraham. They worshipped and lived according to the covenant Abraham made with the Almighty. In the Christian tradition, Jesus rose on the third day, having sacrificed himself on the cross for the forgiveness of original sin (You remember Genesis: Eve, the snake, the apple, and Adam taking a bite of the apple, not the snake). They were freed to join in the celestial celebration of heaven, body and soul.
The tyranny of uncertainty trapped each group until set free by a magnificent god. For hundreds of years, Jews were migrants in Egypt and then migrants in the lands between Egypt and Canaan. As Christians believe, god’s children were spiritual migrants until the resurrection of Jesus removed the yoke of original sin.
Our starry-eyed admiration obscures the mettle forged into the souls of the Israelites, early Christians, and even our literary superheroes. Their temperance, courage, and righteousness were tempered by time’s challenges. They endured.
The tales of migrant freedom weren’t lost on the founding fathers, who themselves were migrants or the sons of migrants, strangers in a foreign land. They also read works by contemporaries. They knew the logic of French philosopher Jean Jacque Rousseau, and like him, they preferred liberty with danger, paraphrasing Rousseau and as modeled by the Israelites and early Christians. Liberty is precious.
They also knew the works of philosopher John Locke, who wrote, “That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which… cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty.” Our founding fathers embedded the inherent (or unalienable) rights of life and liberty in their Declaration of Independence from a tyrant whose twirl of quill could alter their lives.
Thirteen years later, as they shaped the U.S. Constitution, they heeded a warning from Rousseau: A nation must build institutions fostering “the co-existence of free and equal citizens in a community where they themselves are sovereign,” as noted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
They set up a system of checks and balances, enabling the executive, legislative, and judiciary to monitor and affect the actions of the different branches of government, each ensuring the constitutionality of any actions by a branch of government. They established “due process” as a fundamental right in the Fifth Amendment: “No person shall be subject, except in cases of impeachment, to more than one punishment or trial for the same offense; nor shall be compelled to be a witness against himself; nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Common law provided protection with the writ of habeas corpus, which forbids unlawful detention. They adhered to the principle of innocent until proven guilty.
Sounds like a good system. It is. Usually, as Rousseau warned. The French philosopher had doubts about humanity’s ability to avoid alienation, oppression, and unfreedom, to paraphrase the Encyclopedia. These weren’t the thoughts of a souring old man. People don’t always appreciate another’s liberty. They perceived one person’s or group’s liberty as a threat. Throughout the nation’s history, this came to be. Many powerful individuals saw threats from the liberty of African Americans, indigenous Americans, and the “hordes” of immigrants entering the country between the 1850s and 1910. These groups were different in the color of their skin, the languages they spoke, and the gods they worshipped, all of which were threats to the “American way” as defined by the people in power, not the Constitution. So, they found various ways of restricting their liberty, and our courts looked the other way. After the Civil Rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s, we assumed the days of restricted liberty had vanished. How white of me. Not so, as Rousseau would have foreseen.
Under the Trump Administration, Americans again witness a threat to liberty, as a sizeable minority embrace “peace with slavery,” as the French philosopher warned. He referred to the restriction of life and liberty, to which we pledge allegiance. There’s a danger to liberty, the danger of someone believing in a concept that differs. The Trump Administration has dissolved liberty by duplicitly enforcing constitutionally sound laws and regulations governing Americans.
He reinforces it with bogus symbols of danger. For example, posters were strung along the Rose Garden with pictures of undocumented aliens who had been arrested. The Administration was attempting to send the message that now Americans are safer. Like many statements from the Trump Administration, the message was, to put it kindly, misleading. Under law established by U.S. law, an individual charged with a crime remains innocent, hence why news accounts usually have the phrase allegedly when covering an arrest. Law enforcement doesn’t always get it right, and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), under the current Administration, has an astounding record of violating the rights of migrants and American citizens, even children.
Let’s drift back slightly more than six decades ago to the start of World War II. Hope was in short supply. The pervasive notion that the enemy lurked behind every tree boiled a hysterical reaction in the bellies of too many Americans. They feared the presence of German-Americans, Italian-Americans, and especially Japanese-Americans on the West Coast. The so-called Americans wanted peace with slavery because the hope of liberty hope was contaminated by the fear of an imagined and illegitimate threat.
By executive order from FDR, more than 120,000 Japanese, of which two-thirds were American citizens, were sent to concentration camps. (Almost 11,000 Germans and slightly more than 3000 Italians also were interned.) The Supreme Coutry also caught the fever and ruled the Executive Order constitutionally sound. It took four decades for cooler and wiser heads to prevail.
In 1983, a presidential commission found little evidence of Japanese disloyalty, concluding that the internment was a product of racism. Congress passed legislation providing for reparations. By the way, the Regimental Combat Team, made up of Japanese Americans, became the most decorated unit in the history of the U.S. military. Just for your information: members of the Black Panthers Tank Corp., comprised predominantly of African Americans, also had a great number of decorated members, even though they were initially considered unable to handle combat, never mind tanks.
Even after people whom the nation robbed of their liberty defended and fought for every American’s freedom, the nation, we, still have not learned to set aside bigotry in recognition of another’s right to liberty.
Bone-spur Trump leads the pack. His ignorance of American history alone makes him ripe for ignoring the liberties of minorities, women, individuals with disabilities, and people who aren’t cis. Add up their numbers, and he disregards the rights of more than 60 percent of the U.S. populace. That disregard is the e coli of human rights.
He has tainted American hope with the dysentery of unreasonable fear. Its stench arises from the artificial and cynical racist pedigree born from the twisted imaginings of this descendent of the moronic Polyphemus, the Homeric Cyclops outwitted by Odysseus, a migrant of the Troyan War.
For almost a decade, Donald Trump has peddled the notion that illegal immigrants are responsible for a high percentage of violent crimes. Americans are safer in an elevator with an undocumented immigrant than with a lifelong American male.
To help us understand the role illegal immigrants play in violent crime, the Department of Justice removed a page from its website regarding the subject. The agency did so under the direction of a Trumpian Executive Order. The agency, fortunately, does not know how to edit an HTML site. The headline for the site was: “Undocumented Aliens Commit Crimes at a Lower Rate,” as provided by the DOJ’s National Institute of Justice. The American Immigrant Council conducted a similar analysis of criminal data and found that “higher immigrant population shares are not associated with higher crime rates, which aligns with a wealth of prior research on this topic.”
Yet, the man who married two immigrants and who greased the way for one’s parents to enter the country still bellows about the invasion of criminals, a lame and fallacious argument he used to institute the 230-year-old, rarely used Alien Enemies Act. He claims America is being invaded, which would be an act of war.
What invasion? Legally, the term means “a military offensive in which a sizable number of combatants of one geopolitical entity aggressively enter territory controlled by another such entity, generally with the objectives of establishing or re-establishing control, retaliation for real or perceived actions, liberation of previously lost,” according to FindLaw Legal Dictionary.
So, the supposed legions of felons escaping jail time in Venezuela don’t constitute an invasion. Facts, however, mean nothing to the U.S. President, for he repeatedly claims, without providing any evidence, that murderers, rapists, and violent felons wander across our border to practice their evil skills in the U.S. That hasn’t stopped the President from using a rarely exercised law to destroy the liberty of individuals seeking a better life, as his grandfather did.
The monocular leader and his followers have forgotten the trials of the Israelites, Christians, and their heroes. They have forgotten descendants of most Americans are the progeny of migrants who entered this country without passports and visas, primarily to escape economic and political repression in their home countries. They have forgotten to ask, “Who wants to leave a place filled with family and friends? Who wants to leave behind a place with a familiar culture and language?” Immigrants abandoned a life they knew in the hope of something better. Finally, and equally important, our leaders have forgotten the teachings of Rousseau and Locke, although I doubt our President even knows who these two men are.
His ignorance extends beyond the realms of political philosophy. This past October, during an interview with talk show host Hugh Hewitt, “Donald Trump drew a link between immigration, violent crime, and genetics, stating, ‘We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.’ Comments such as these are not new. Claims regarding genes and human behavior have long been used to perpetuate social harm,” according to the Hastings Center for Bioethics. It’s a time-worn, fallacious sophistry used to rationalize slavery, the slaughter of Indigenous Americans, and the Holocaust, as well as to justify the formation of past and present neo-Nazi organizations.
(It’s ironic that an individual who has bankrupted three casinos in a relatively short time, defrauded New York State according to a jury of peers, and sexually assaulted a woman in the female dressing room again according to a jury of his peers has not examined his gene pool in relation to his behavior. On the surface, one may wonder if he shares in a similar gene pool as the violent immigrants he imagines entering the country.)
It’s a simple matter. Racism. It surrounds him. During the 2024 campaign, Steven Miller, now a Trumpian whisperer and white nationalist, said, “America is for Americans and Americans only,” as noted by The Guardian. Simply put, Trump, at the very least, entertains racist views. For example, around the same time as Miller proposed America for Americans, Trump held a rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The event, which was called his triumphant homecoming to New York, “turned into a political fiasco…as pro-Trump comedian’s racist diatribe drew furious condemnation, including from prominent Republicans,” reported Politico. Least we forget, he once complained too many African Americans and too few Jews counted the money at his casinos. He entwined two racist tropes in one sentence.
Luxuriating in this climate, he naturally imitated King George III. The President picked up his Sharpie and scrawled his signature to an executive order denying thousands of individuals, some illegal, some legal, life, liberty, and due process. No charges were brought forth. They were denied access to legal counsel. Individuals with visas were not given enough time to challenge a deportation order, as required by law. Others were accused of being criminals without evidence.
Even immigrants with Temporary Protective Status visas, such as the Afghanistanis who worked closely with American soldiers in the struggles against the Taliban, had their visas revoked or were unable to renew them. “While Afghans who came to the U.S. during the official military evacuation are supposed to be exempt from the parole termination, at least a couple accidentally got termination notices. Furthermore, many came after the evacuation and so are not exempt,” according to Military.com. Afghans who worked with the military are entitled to a Special Immigration Visa. It has taken years to get a SIV. With few options, Afghans have relied on programs such as TPS, enabling them to remain legally in the country until their SIV is processed.
ICEis stopping people in the street and asking for visas. Justice Department lawyers are stalling or bypassing orders issued by federal judges. Meanwhile, the upholder of the Constitution demeans judges who rule against the Administration’s position.
“Donald Trump is undermining the fundamental right to due process from several directions, whether by intimidating law firms, defying and threatening judges, or attempting to defund children’s attorneys. The aim appears to be to cut off immigrants’ access to legal representation, while the effect is to erode their civil liberties,” according to the Guardian. His actions have nothing to do with the legality of these individuals being in the U.S. It boils down to bad genes, and he knows they have bad genes. Look at their skin color and listen to their language.
His threats to liberty extend beyond the realm of immigration and into the lives of Americans. He has restricted access to federal records and buildings by attorneys or law firms whom he scratched onto his revenge list for some imagined offense. He promised retribution, but he never explained at whose expense. These attorneys and law firms represent clients who are entitled to legal representation of their choice (liberty). Denying their counsels access to federal buildings will impede their ability to represent their clients effectively.
It’s schoolyard tit for tat. These firms “did him wrong,” so now it’s time to get even. The justice of a schoolyard bully is an oxymoron. It’s injustice. His vengeance restricts due process of individuals and companies represented by these law firms.
His actions also have emboldened neighbors. These self-righteous individuals are threatening their fellow citizens as well as their spouses and children. The high and mighty dislike neighbors who favor debate in history and English classes or they teach the scientific principles behind climate change. The threats are more than nasty emails. Police have visited the homes of the threatened to warn them to improve their security. The police say their hands are tied until a threat materializes. Why? Free speech. (It’s a childish form of liberty. I have it, but you don’t because I don’t like what you stand for.) Instead, the threatened and their families move from towns where they have lived for decades, making them political migrants.
He’s filing bogus claims against major media outlets and holding the mergers of others for ransom. In doing so, he hinders freedom of the press. He prefers the media to cheer his sloppy verbiage and incoherent policies.
He is intimidating universities he considers too liberal or woke. Most are not, even places like Harvard and Yale. Are there liberal universities? Yes. Do liberal professors teach at these universities? Yes. Do students have the ability to pick and choose their classes? Yes. Are they mandated to attend particular universities? No. Can they attend Liberty University, Brigham Young University, Grove City University, Bob Jones University, or the dozens of other conservative universities, whatever that means? Yes. Are there a variety of Christian universities for students? Yes. (My brothers and sister attended Catholic universities as did many of my cousins. Some might say we didn’t receive a Christian education and were influenced by the devil. For example, Representative Margorie Taylor Greene has claimed that Satan is controlling the Catholic Church, which I guess would make it non-Christian.) Do they need to go to Harvard to receive a good education? Heck, no. Does placing restrictions on what is taught by whom to whom restrict the free exchange of information and belittle critical thinking? Yes. Is it a classic step to the installation of an authoritarian government? Hell, yes. Is it another restriction of an individual’s liberty? Yes.
Elon Musk promised to give the Trump Administration an AI system to help route out corruption and individuals who disagree with the Administration’s policy. In theory, it also could be used to track American citizens in general. “‘This is what we were always scared of,’ said Kevin Bankston, a longtime civil liberties lawyer and a senior adviser on AI governance at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a policy and civil rights organization. ‘The infrastructure for turnkey totalitarianism is there for an administration willing to break the law,’” notes an opinion piece in the New York Times.
Each step taken by the Trump Administration in the first 90 days of office has chipped away at the Lockean and Rousseauean notions of liberty upon which this country was founded. Even his tariffs have chiseled at the liberty of companies to operate as they see fit and as consumers prefer to spend, and they are tied to the mighty power of his Sharpie, not to the liberties of Americans.
You could call these actions movements towards what Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a Trumpian favorite, calls illiberal Christian democracy. What does it mean? It’s a system of government that cloaks antidemocratic policies under the guise of democratic institutions. Under his rule, his government has been referred to as being a kleptocracy and a mafia state. How much different is that from the use of executive orders to circumvent the Constitution (birth-right citizenship); restrict what schools can teach regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion; and increase water pressure. How different is the Orban kleptocracy from the Trumpian embrace of crypto, easing of crypto regulations, the dropping of pending suits, and the crypto fortune made by the Trump family since his election. “World Liberty Financial [the crypto firm launched by the Trump Organization] has eviscerated the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in ways without precedent in modern American history,” reports the New York Times.
We are steps from the dystopian world Rousseau warned against. Liberty is too consequential for people like Trump. Liberty is democracy’s speed bump and, therefore, an inconvenience to his agenda, his thinking, and his presumption of autonomy over the American people, especially those without “good genes.” His majesty is digesting democracy and fattening his pocketbook, ego, and rear end as if he sat through a master’s class conducted by Orban with a guest lecture by Vald Putin.
I’m not alone in these thoughts. After listening to the government’s argument regarding the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case in the Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Sotomayor wrote the following in her dissenting opinion: “The implication of the government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal.”
Initially, the DOJ argued that the U.S. could not remove Garcia from his El Salvadorean prison because of El Salvador’s sovereignty. Just recently, however, the President announced that he could get Garcia removed, but he didn’t want to. Why? Because of Garcia’s gang activities, for which there’s no credible evidence. I’m sure Trump thinks he has bad genes.
His good-genes-bad-genes philosophy mates with Christian Nationalism, which claims that America is a Christian nation. It’s an odd mating since Trump’s idea of Sunday worship is 18 holes of golf, but evangelicals formed a significant portion of his base, making them a necessity for his election.
To ensure their support, Trump launched the National Faith Advisory Board in 2021.
“As Trump’s “Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) transformation of the party reveals, Trump’s bond with his supporters is forged from different material: namely, his militant mission to return power to white Christian America,” reported Time magazine. He appointed televangelist Paula White-Cain, who bankrupted her church, which had $150 million in revenue over four years, as senior advisor to his Faith Policy Institute. Other than sharing bankruptcy with Trump, she gained notoriety at the Stop-the-Steal rally, where she asked god to destroy “every demonic network” opposing Trump. He also created an anti-Christian bias task force under Attorney General Pam Bondi. (I’ve been Christian, raised my kids as Christians, and remain a waffling Christian. Never in seven decades have I recognized any behavior hinting at Christian bias. So much for government efficiency.)
There’s so much more.
Without a doubt, Christianity influenced the evolution of America. It had nothing to do with a god. It’s logic. Everyone in America, excluding Indigenous Americans and the first Africans, were Christian. They dominated the nation’s politics and culture.
The introduction of Rousseau and Locke stymied its influence. For example, there’s nothing about Christianity in the Constitution. In fact, the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion. That didn’t stop the bigotry. With their majority, “Christians” easily restricted the rights of non-Christians, as determined by the populus. Even the Irish, who were noted for their Catholicism, were excluded from society because they were papists. Today, Christian nationalists want a return to the days when Protestantism dominated our culture, when men worked, when women stayed home and got pregnant, when everyone was white, and when fewer than 50 percent of the adult population governed the remainder. It was the land of the brave and home of the almost free.
Are we so afraid of liberty that we prefer peace with slavery? Are we more content living under a regime where a president and his cohorts figure out how to populate America with good-gene people? Where wealth and health are only for the saved? Where only white American males know God’s will? Where the coming of the Lord Almighty will bless the nation if everyone converts to Christianity? Where I will have to spell god with an upper case G?
If yes, then America is no longer a nation of liberty and justice for all.
For a Dignity Deserved 