Commentary, Park Forest

Dan Rather: ‘Today I Shed a Tear for Our Country’


TEXAS–(ENEWSPF)–January 29, 2017

By smaylone

Protest DFW – Dallasnewsphoto

Like the rest of the country, I watched in horror at what was happening at airports around the country yesterday.  I rejoiced with thousands of others when a New York Federal Judge issued an emergency stay after hearing the class action suit filed by the ACLU.  Whereas this is just the beginning of our countries long road to protect our 1st and 5th constitutional amendments rights, it’s a step in the right direction.

Even though I believe justice will ultimately prevail, the realism that we as a country have journeyed yet again down this road of fear and discrimination is heartbreaking.

Journalist Dan Rather eloquently summed it up perfectly in his recent Facebook Blog:

The United States became the most powerful nation in the history of mankind not merely on the basis is its fearsome military, as lethal and well trained as that may be. It wasn’t solely based on its unprecedented economic engine, as dynamic and far-reaching as that may be. America’s greatness was forged by a Constitutional compact of grand and universal ideals that the country has tried to live up to ever since.

For generations, we have been an imperfect but vital beacon of freedom to a world too often wandering and failing in moral confusion. But that ultimate strength has dimmed considerably in light of the recent actions on immigration from the new President Donald Trump. We are turning around desperate refugees. We are singling out men, women, and children on the basis of their faith – and we are doing all of this with a randomness and capriciousness that defies reason.

A colleague of mine used the term “heartless” to describe so much of the President’s executive actions. Sadly, I found it an apt and dispiriting diagnosis—especially when faced with the results of his executive order on immigration. For over the years, I have seen that our greatest American leaders extol empathy rather than condemnation. They have known that in a complicated world, it is best to make policy choices with a scalpel – not a hacksaw. Sometimes, when our national security is threatened at the level of World War II, all-out conflict is the only recourse. But those instances are by far the exception.

From Vietnam, to the Iraq War, from Japanese internment camps to the centuries-long persecution on the basis of race and ethnicity that almost toppled our democratic experiment, broad strokes channeling our least compassionate and most jingoistic impulses have always made us weaker rather than stronger.

Japanese Internment Camp — Camp Marzanar CA. Photo: smaylone

Today, in the wake of his one-man decision to wreck and reverse immigration policy so suddenly, there is chaos and confusion mixed with heartbreak and fear. A well thought-out, measured overhaul of immigration policy, with organized-in-advance measures to implement that is one thing—and one that perhaps a majority of Americans would support, But this mess, created overnight, is quite another. With this, we have embolden our enemies who want to see nothing else than to compete in a world of moral relativism. In the Cold War, our struggles over civil rights fed into the propaganda of the Soviet Union – as our new actions fuel the extremism Mr. Trump claims to be attacking.”

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Source: http://dailykos.com

 

 

 


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