Time To Speak Out

It is important to try to understand what is happening to our divided country. This is not the same country as when I was growing up in the fifties on our red dirt street in Lewisville, NC. Dr. Hampton was still making house calls, and in five minutes I could walk to Beck’s General Store to find five or ten-cent glass bottles of Coke in an old chest style water cooler. My first years in grade school were when we stood in line for Polio vaccines, and no one that I knew complained or turned them down. We had shared realities like the fear of polio and pride in our country and president.
Even though I was just in elementary school, I was very proud that Eisenhower was president. I had supported him even though my mother had voted for Adlai Stevenson. Our views on the president were shaped by two things. Mother and I watched The Huntley–Brinkley Report each night and discussed the day’s news which we also got from the morning Winston-Salem Journal and the evening Sentinel. Newspapers were a big part of my early years in grade school.
Fast forward seventy years, many newspapers including the Sentinel are long gone. The Winston-Salem Journal that I read online is a shadow its former self. I no longer watch the evening news regularly especially now that CBS has let politics influence what they report. CBS pulled a recent 60 Minutes segment about Venezuelan migrants deported to a harsh El Salvador prison.
Many believe CBS management was worried about being sued once again by our litigious president. The segment which aired in Canada has yet to result in any new law suits, but CBS also recently changed evening news anchors and has scheduled the departure of Stephen Colbert later this year. The new anchor closed his first broadcast with words praising the secretary of state, Marco Rubio. The only apparent reason appears to winning favor with the administration. We have a very thin-skinned administration whose first response to the slightest criticism is to attack early and harshly, often using language others view as antagonistic, demeaning and at times authoritarian. The president regularly calls the press “the enemy of the people.”
When pressure from politics twists the news, stations like CBS can no longer claim objectivity. The slippery slope to becoming propaganda gets closer when that happens.
There are plenty of sources for news today. Some of them remain reliable but the president continues to threaten to pull the broadcast licenses of ABC and NBC while FOX long ago lost all objectivity and even admitted in legal proceedings that their content is opinion not hard news. Strong reporting by mainstream television stations on the nightly news arguably did more to stop the Vietnam war than any protests.
Having a common truth shaped by hard news is critical part of having a country that can grow and flourish. Many scientific facts such as climate change and the efficacy of vaccines have come under attack from groups that seem to believe they can get all the knowledge they need to navigate the world from YouTube or partisan Podcasts. Vetted news and real science are out of fashion with the current administration which complains bitterly when someone fact checks the president’s speeches. The most visible result of the anti-vaccine mindset is a resurgence of measles in our neighboring state of South Carolina. That has allowed measles cases to jump the border into NC. Denying science and removing green energy incentives because of disbelief in climate change and the misguided desire to prop up oil companies has ceded much of the positive growth from green energy resources to China.
The recent shooting of Nicole Good in Minnesota has made it clear that the government wants us to see it their way and ignore any pesky reports that point out inconsistencies. The White House immediately accused Good who was trying to slowly drive away in her car of being a “domestic terrorist.” According to the dictionary which is so far immune to political pressure terrorism is, “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” The domestic terrorist definition is a perfect fit for ICE and its mission. Nicole Good’s last words to the ICE agent were "That's fine, dude, I'm not mad at you.” Seconds later she is shot three times. Then an ICE agent is heard uttering profanity. News agencies have accurately reported the incident except perhaps FOX News. David Holmes at Esquire saw this on a FOX broadcast, “WOMAN RAMS ICE AGENT, GETS SHOT, beneath the words was a video from the scene showing Good’s SUV ramming nobody.” David Holmes then very appropriately quoted George Orwell’s 1984, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
I choose to believe my eyes which have watched several videos of the incident. No video that I have seen shows Nicole trying to ram anyone. Anyone who says otherwise is ignoring multiple sources of video evidence. In spite of the lack of corroborating evidence, an ICE spokesperson said “one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them – an act of domestic terrorism.” Always quick to go on offense, JD Vance chimed in “It was obvious to everybody, he suggested, that Good was so brainwashed by leftwing ideology that she was determined to kill a law enforcement officer.” None of this is true, Britain’s Guardian, which is independent enough to not fear the administration had this headline, “Trump administration unleashes torrent of untruths after woman shot dead by ICE.” The Republican members of the House, always ready to hide under their desks voted unanimously to not subpoena evidence of the Good shooting. Obviously they do not want to know or speak the truth if it offends the president.
Demonizing anyone that disagrees with them whether dead or alive is an established pattern with this administration just as is the non-stop lying which seeks to have us believe that the violent attack on our national Capitol was a patriotic gathering. The attempts at obfuscating history have gotten to the point that the Senate had to unanimously pass a resolution that approved installing a Jan. 6, 2021 plaque to honor law enforcement officers who protected the Capitol that day. Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, had refused to place it in attempt to support the president alternative reality of January 6, 2021 being a peaceful gathering.
It is obvious to many of us that our government is attempting to get people to believe what they are told, not what they have seen with their own eyes. They are also saying they have absolute immunity to shoot someone like Nicole Good. According to legal experts that is untrue and would be very disturbing if it were true. You may not agree with the way Nicole Good lived her life or her particular politics, but none of that justifies her shooting or death. Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for Intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, has this to say and it should be something to which we can all agree, “It is the responsibility of law enforcement to do two things. One is to preserve life. And second is to deescalate any situation that they might view or might be perceived as being hostile.” Pulling a gun and shooting an unarmed woman trying to leave the scene should never have been the default reaction of the ICE agent. Was it poor training or the hiring of the wrong kind of agent? We will likely never know because this administration never admits to mistakes or welcomes any investigation or scrutiny especially into gun violence. Currently ICE has 25,000 agents and a budget of $28.7 Billion with another $75 billion allocated over the next four year by way of the One Big Beautiful Bill. It is now the largest law enforcement agency in the US and may be the one with the least training since there are reports that their training schedule has been drastically reduced because of the huge influx of agents.
The immigration crackdown was sold to the American public by Donald Trump who has consistently stated that his deportation efforts would first and foremost focus on “criminals.” So far there has been an estimated 328,000 arrests and nearly 327,000 deportations. The focus has been on people of color not just criminals. Around 72% of individuals in ICE detention have no criminal conviction. Only 5% have convictions for violent crime.
I am not in favor of masked pseudo-military agents pulling people from cars but that does not mean I am advocating for an open border. I do believe we need a legal pathway to citizenship for more than just white Afrikaners. Our family is close to immigrants who are now American citizens. Their contributions are very important to our lives Without immigrants the American economy will shrink. JD Vance would have us believe that immigrants are stealing from us. The opposite is true. The most recent numbers that I can find show that undocumented immigrants paid $25.7 Billion into Social Security in 2022. That same year they paid $96.7 Billion in federal, state, and local taxes which includes their taxes for medicare and unemployment. Remember these undocumented immigrants are barred by law from receiving any of these benefits even though they have paid money into the programs. JD Vance is flat out lying when he says immigrants are stealing your benefits. They are actually subsidizing our benefits without any hope of a return to themselves.
The alternate reality created around Nicole Good and all immigrants mirrors the government wanting us to believe the legality of attacking Venezuela to capture its president for a drug warrant when they were actually after the country’s oil. All of that as many have said is just wrong. The fantasy that because we have the might to take Greenland that it would be right goes against all International Law and what our soldiers have fought and died for over the last 130 years. We have a government that wants us to believe that might makes right. Unfortunately for the administration, just 33% of Americans support the attack on Venezuela. Only 8% of American support taking Greenland by force. Just as our president is violating International Law, he is saying he does not need iInternational Law.
If we start to agree on some facts that all our eyes have seen, perhaps we can move to convincing the president through our words and peaceful protests that we intend to make sure the United States remains a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
We will not allow it to be transformed into a government designed to enrich the president and all the rich sycophants around him while slapping his name on all our treasured buildings that he has yet to tear down.
I will close with this quote from Jamie Boule in the New York Times, “It is true that the country needs some form of immigration enforcement. But it doesn’t need ICE. It doesn’t need an agency whose institutional identity is wedded to wanton cruelty and the apparent hair-trigger use of lethal force. It doesn’t need an agency that has been transformed into a paramilitary enforcer of despotic rule.”