On Caravans and Conservatives

EXERCISING BASIC HUMANITY TAKES A KIND OF COURAGE THE RIGHT JUST DOES NOT HAVE

I knew it! I just knew it!

I’ve been working on a video project and, hence, I’ve not been actively writing on this blog of late. I did, however, take a moment to peruse some social media when I noticed a link posted by one of my conservative friends. I try not to spend too much time down that rabbit hole anymore, but I could not help but read the meme. The meme suggested that the Democratic Party was funding and supporting the caravan of Honduran refugees. After all, it was no accident that this horde of Hondurans happened just before the election.

Oh, great! I thought. Someone is certainly going to bring up George Soros. That’s pretty much as constant as Godwin’s Law. When it comes to paranoid, right-wing conspiracy theory boogeymen, Soros’s is at the top of the list. Sure enough, not a day later…(facepalm). But then again, it’s Pat Robertson.¹ I passed it off as just another far right, fringy bit of blather. I’m dense. It seems that I will never learn that there is no longer any such thing as farrightfringyblatherbits. There’s just Rabbit Hole, Hallucinogenic Right-Wing Reporting…and reasonable people. It didn’t take long before even the New York Times had to respond to what was the mainstream paradigm coming from the right.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. At this point, the American conservative movement is conditioned to digest a mono-cultural diet of fear. When the right-wing media holds out a blooding chunk of fear-mongering, their base swallows it out of pure instinct. That’s why every paradigm of the right involved doom, evil, enemies from within, enemies from without. It’s Soros, the Deep State, Black Lives Matters, Homosexuals trying to convert your children into their unholy church.

That’s why President Trump was ready to call out the National Guard, a certain violation of Posse Comitatus, before the Caravan had even reached the southern Mexican border. Get to the barricades, boys! We’re under attack! The barbarians are at the gates! Be afraid! Be very, very afraid! After all, these aren’t just a caravan of poor families trying to escape yet another U.S. backed dictatorship. No. This is a horde of criminals and “unknown Middle Easterners“…because, you know, brown people.

So, I guess that whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing is back in the box.

So in this regard, I have just two observations.

First, if this were a Democratic Party conspiracy to sway the election, it would be the dumbest strategy ever. Nothing brings out the conservative vote quite like hordes of brown people coming to take our jobs and get on food stamps.

Secondly, the right wing doles out the fear and the rest of us are stuck trying to tamp down the paranoia. This keeps us from dealing with very real issues. There is a huge caravan of refugees on their way to the United States, fleeing social conditions that the United States was instrumental in creating. What is our moral responsibility in preserving the basic human dignity and secure the fundamental human rights of these people? And how do we prepare ourselves for doing just that? This is the real issue, and this is exactly what we are not talking about.