I’m trying to decorate this weekend and get into some Yuletide cheer, but I’m struggling like so many Americans who actually have a heart and care about basic human decency. Unlike those who cheer on the pain and indignity incurred by others—and those who are the cause of such inhumane atrocities.
Within 48 hours of being on White Sands Blvd this week to pick up copies of my annual holiday letter from Staples (after spending last weekend attempting to get my laptop to recognize my fully operational printer), I saw a video of an “arrest” on Facebook of a non-white male that occurred directly across the street.
My throat closed up upon realizing that fully masked and therefore unidentifiable thugs known as ICE had invaded Alamogordo. So much for getting in the Christmas spirit. I was consumed with sorrow and angst while walking my dog, when I should’ve been marveling at majestic mountain views, darting cottontails and jackrabbits, and a javelina that’s been hanging around the neighborhood for weeks.
It’s further disheartening that this is merely a more horrific repeat for this disgrace of a presidential administration, and the equally lacking-in-grace cretins who continue to support it. I literally began writing my first Other Worldly novel, Alienable Rights, in 2017 to address stress induced by hate-based race and immigration issues, because I was living in what was known as the agricultural county of Nevada at the time.
I realized, if this nation treats immigrant laborers with such abhorrent bigotry—including designating them illegal aliens—it wasn’t much of a stretch to extend that despicable and irrational mindset to a fictional scenario involving aliens of the extraterrestrial kind. Which I have proceeded to do with six additional OW novels and counting.
However, just as it’s difficult to muster a festive mood, it’s becoming increasingly hard to write fiction as a catharsis for this ongoing nightmare of a reality. Fact is, none of this should be happening again. But it is. And in my estimation it’s all a result of a malingering toxic residue from none other than the Civil War—of more than 150 flipping years ago.
Yesterday was the 160th anniversary of the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which occurred on December 6, 1865. Amendment XIII reads as follows:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Aside from Congressional abdication of its duty to act as a check and balance on this administration, literally everything that is happening with respect to (or disrespect of) immigration, including ICE terrorism and rampant Republican attempts to suppress the non-white vote (shameless, heartless, utterly corrupt Texas racial gerrymandering), is a result of Christian Nationalists aka white supremacists who have never gotten over the Civil War—or the US electing a Black president. Twice.
But the failed Confederacy is not the only losing cause of a past conflict these irascible bigots desperately cling to. There’s also World War II, because Nazism and fascism are alive and well within the Republican Party aka MAGA cult, and among the aforementioned racist groups literally flourishing within it.
Like the Civil War era, this is about cheap labor and laborers who can be exploited as slave labor if they are categorized as less than human and therefore underserving of rights. It also continues to be about keeping those laborers from voting.
And why is it only immigrant laborers who are being hauled away in handcuffs without legitimate due process per 14th Amendment due process rights—note how the 13th Amendment denotes that one must be convicted of a crime to be held in involuntary servitude—and yet nary an actual employer of these laborers is being held accountable for exploiting human beings in violation of immigration, labor, and human rights law?
Care to guess how these modern-day slave masters vote? Why haven’t members of the media addressed this glaring hypocrisy?
These who all seem to identify as devout Christians are all descendants of immigrants themselves. They are not in any way patriotic Americans trying to make our nation better. Instead, they aim to take us back to a time when anyone who wasn’t white or male had no power, no rights, and were indeed seen as second-class citizens or less than human.
They’ve already admitted a desire to strip American women of the right to vote in addition to the loss of bodily autonomy. They seek to enslave others for the glory, greed, and power of men who also appear unable to get over the biological fact that they can’t give birth, no matter how wealthy and white they are. They also can’t or won’t grasp the reality that literally no one in that biblical manger scene is white, American, or even Christian.
Human trafficking is a form of slavery in violation of the 13th Amendment. Whether it’s the Department of Homeland Security snatching people off the street and imprisoning them or shipping them off to another country without due process, or the wealthy and powerful using girls and women for sexual servitude. By the way, where are those Epstein files? Tick tock.
Ebenezer Scrooge has nothing on these feckless folks whom Hilary was right to deem deplorable. They are far more selfish, hateful, violent, and twisted than anything fiction writers can fathom. Insecure losers throughout history who expend all their energy rationalizing a nonexistent superiority.
If immigrants can come to this nation and take their jobs as easily and often as they whine about it, perhaps it’s because they themselves aren’t qualified. The real problem is they’ve had literally everything handed to them without having had to compete for it (except against other white males) for the past 250 plus years. This while they profit off of immigrant laborers they have extorted and dehumanized to justify their unmitigated greed. Bah fucking humbug.
But Judgment Day is coming. It has to be. They’ve been nothing but losers throughout history—today is Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, no less—and they will lose again. One day soon there will be no room at the inn for this despicable despot and his tyrannical thugs, but there will be jail cells.
Let’s deck the halls with liberty and justice for all, not just the privileged punks grasping for power—and relevance.