A couple days ago, Sean Spicer, our WH Press Secretary, was confronted in an Apple store by an admittedly "impolite" critic of the President, a young woman of Indian descent, born here, no discernible accent, seems like her heart's in the right place, who asked him some annoying and rude questions, saying Trump is a "fascist" and so forth, and at one point Sean Spicer said this: "It's such a great country that allows you to be here."
Now, I understand how annoying it can be to visit one of those telecom stores. My wife and I have a scheme for dealing with it. We play sane shopper/insane shopper. They can either deal with her quickly and give us the best deal they have, or, I act like a silly lunatic in the store, creating distraction and chaos, and getting the other customers to join in, without actually bothering anyone, just creating General Disarray, but forcing the salesperson to hurry up and get us the hell out of there. Learned it from my Dad. I am fun to shop with.
So, I can imagine being confronted in one of these stores, and getting a little flustered with the lady asking the rather crude, lumpy questions about Russia and Treason and Fascism, but Spicer's response was very telling...
Yesterday, Rep. Steve King, a Republican from Iowa long known being a One-Trick-Pony (immigrant-bashing), tweeted, "We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies." And he doubled down...
And King himself refused to back away from the tweet. On CNN Monday morning, King said, "I meant exactly what I said," and that he'd "like to see an America that's just so homogeneous that we look a lot the same, from that perspective."
There have been large shifts in the demographics of the world over the past couple-thousand years. We are still in the midst of this shifting. The US is a very recent product of this shifting. We are a country made up mostly of immigrants. During certain periods in our history, we had unprecedentedly high levels of upward mobility, and most always more than the rest of the world. We absorbed new, usually rather poor, immigrants as the last wave moved up. Now that upward mobility is down, below that of Europe, irony, the Right blames the immigrants and minorities, irony of ironies, for that lack of upward mobility. In case you don't know, immigrants and minorities, pretty much by definition, only hold so much power. They are not politically capable of holding back those above the mobility-ladder from them, and it is not in their interest to hold down themselves.
The Grown-Up Question raised here should be, "How do we increase upward mobility?"
Well, here's how not to do it...
The Congressional Budget Office projects that 14 million people will lose coverage by 2018 under the Republican ObamaCare replacement bill.
“I’ve been telling you why don’t we wait, just let (Obamacare) implode and let’s not take the blame,” Trump said to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price,... “I’ve been telling you that as an option. It’s not an option I like, frankly, but it’s certainly an option.”
And it just goes on...
You can blame immigrants and minorities if you like, but if you don't want to have the babies, and you don't want to build the roads, and you don't care if you can get proper health care, maybe you should just get the fuck out of the way and let someone "else's" BABY take care of things.
JMJ
