(01-30-2017, 10:52 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(01-30-2017, 02:51 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: Nearly 20 years ago, in the throes of Clinton Derangement Syndrome, I would drive a few blocks from the office with my lunch, and park on a quiet street at the edge of the San Francisco Bay salt marshes. I would tune my radio to 560 KSFO and listen to Michael Savage. It must have been around 1998 that I first heard his slogan: "Borders, Language, Culture."I used to travel into Canada without needing a US passport. I used to be able to get on an airplane without a two/three hour wait. It's a bitch that a 5 generation American (dad's side)/13 generation American (mothers side) has to go through the same routine as all our Islamic newbies. Are you looking for sympathy for him? Where are you going to find sympathy for him in today's America?
It seemed innocent enough. Obviously, maintaining border control is a good thing. We need customs and immigration officers to maintain orderly processing in of people coming into the country. Language is important - competence in the lingua franca is obviously a key to success. A shared culture helps us to norm on commonly understood and agreed principles of ethics, law and ways of doing business. It's all good.
Unfortunately, demagogues can take these concepts out of context, marry them with resentments held by various identity groups, spin them for political gain, or even, use them to fuel the fires of chaos.
From the seemingly innocent "Borders, Language and Culture" of the late 20th Century we have moved to "your papers please" and God forbid you don't have the correct type of name or national origin.
This is going to go badly. There are now VIPs and high status people caught up in the travel ban, some of them well regarded Resident Aliens. It's one thing to catch Joe Wetback doing a crime and deporting him, it's quite another to tell some advance degreed corporate senior management person they are not allowed to hop on the shuttle to get home to his wife and kids. It is DEPLORABLE.
We are still in the War on Terror; Dubya exploited it for his slightly-authoritarian agenda, and Obama simply waged it. Things tend to relax as people forget the fear. But fear is ramping up under President Trump, and I would not be surprised if you soon needed a Soviet-style internal passport to travel more than thirty miles from home. To fight Islam and illegal aliens, America will need Soviet-style internal passports just to cross state lines -- or even go fifty miles in any direction. Now that will be dreadful.
Just think of it -- I will have to wait at some checkpoint just so that I can get to Best Buy, Target, JC Penney, or Barnes and Noble.
...Are you sure that with Donald Trump as President that America is still a free country?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.