Pages

Thursday, February 23, 2017

Trump's Immigration Policy Spreads Fear, Elicits Blowback: To The Spoils Belongs The Victor


The news that President Trump ordered an aggressive crackdown on 11 million undocumented people sent a chill through immigrant communities. California…
LATIMES.COM

Alan: Here is my reply to friend Fred Owen's Facebook post:

A fundamental difference between right-wing and left-wing psyches is that right-wingers are "immediate people," reacting in "The Now," prioritizing the pseudo-solutions of so-called "common sense."

"On the other side of the aisle," it is widely understood that most matters-of-importance require discernment of unintended consequences which, in turn, cry out for "UNcommon sense."

Trump and his followers are so viscerally reactive, so captive to momentary passions, that their chest-thumping "around" deportation will provoke colossal (if not calamitous) consequences - consequences they cannot imagine and have no desire to imagine.

Consider the many ways Mexico might strike back: http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/.../mexico-may-strike...

In crude parlance, Trumpistas cannot repress the zoological urge "to get their rocks off NOW."

As the planet becomes increasingly inter-related, and as more and more sophisticated collaboration proves indispensable for "making things work," age-old dominance-submission hierachies (ruled by satrap Alpha Dogs) are not only anachronistic but obsolete.

Simian bluster and eruptive bombast are no longer enough to "win the day."

Paradoxically, these coupled characteristics are likely to lose the day.

With appalling frequency, "carrying a big stick" now unleashes enormous (and immediate) blowback, consequences that were unthinkable just last century.

In my own lifetime I have witnessed the following epochal change:

A dependable aphorism used to say: "To the victor belongs the spoils."

Now, it is routinely true that "to the spoils belongs the victor." (I suspect this "spoilage" is why China does not want "ownership" of North Korea - just as Chinese leadership is content to let Taiwan behave as if it were an autonomous state even though, technically, China and Taiwan are "one country." https://www.nytimes.com/.../trump-taiwan-and-china-the...)

Like it or not, there is not a snowball's chance that "common sense" can devise productive policy in our "new world order."

No comments:

Post a Comment