With all respect to Jim Hildebrand, let me begin at the end of his letter: “there is no other country that has delivered on its promises like ours.”
Dear Jim, that is exactly the problem. King Donald and his court are in the process of dismantling, mostly by his royal fiat, not votes in Congress, all the progress made since the Civil Rights Era. That progress, of course, is what has MAGA scared to death. Indignation at the whittling away of real freedom for all! Is the basis of “No Kings!” And a desperate concern to point it out and rally against it is not a waste of time. Yes, people do sacrifice time at their jobs to travel from protest to protest. It’s that important.
In regard to his winning the election, Donald Trump got 49.9% of the popular vote. He won because Republican gerrymandering tilted the balance of the obsolete Electoral College, which is long overdue for being repealed and dismantled. His talk of a mandate is very weak tea, and purposefully misleading. How unusual.
Moving onward to Vice President Vance’s visit, it is a shame his children had to be subjected to the reality of how much the citizens of Vermont object to the policies of a vice president who has been censured by the Pope for his upside-down views of Christianity. Was he really that naïve that he thought he could come to Vermont and be welcomed? Poor judgment, I think. It’s his fault his children had to go through that.
And then we get to immigration.
“Who is going to milk cows, wait tables and work towards the American dream?”
Does anyone remember a movie called “Bread and Chocolate”?
Then he reminds us that “the current fertility rate is 1.664 children/woman, which is below the replacement rate.” Hello? This is good news. The great unmentionable is that there are way too many of us for the good of our beautiful blue planet, and reducing the birthrate should be our highest priority. Of course that might cut into profits. Oh. And it would mean less oil being burned too. Hmm. Same idea.
But let’s keep going. “ICE is employed to make our citizens safer.” Hmm, again. Tell that to people in Minneapolis. And, “How many more American citizens need to die or be raped at the hands of criminal illegals?” Real statistics— as opposed to Trump’s lies— lead us to understand that immigrants are generally more law-abiding than American citizens. In that regard, I’ll quote again from his letter, where an un-identified undocumented worker says, “But in the end, this is not my country. And they also know they are in a foreign country and rules are rules the government establishes its own rules, and that’s valid.”
Perhaps the rage of the Republican right and MAGA against immigrants arises from historical guilt for the way European immigrants robbed, raped and murdered their way across two continents as they destroyed an ancient civilization and killed almost 90% of its indigenous people over a couple hundred years. People alive today didn’t do that, but substantive reparations are very much still due. That was the European colonizers, not the people who “milk cows, wait tables and work towards the American dream.”
Dodds lives in Waitsfield
